The Right Time for Making Whoopee

I am so excited I can hardly contain myself. (If I was a lab pup I would piddle on the floor.) My husband and I are taking 5 days away together. We are looooooooong overdue for a break away together.

Next Thursday morning I will send my children off to school and daycare and my husband and I will get in the van and drive to Penticton British Columbia. This is my favorite trip to make together. We only live about an hour and a half from the gateway to the Rocky Mountains. We leave in the morning and buy a picnic lunch of fresh vegetables and fruit, sandwich stuff and drinks in Canmore. Then we continue on through Banff National Park, on to Field BC where we stop by an icy blue river and enjoy lunch. Then we move on through to Golden and Revelstoke to Sicamous (LOVE Mara Lake). From there we'll head south towards Vernon and hit orchard country, where the land will change to rolling lush ranges of fruit trees and vegetables fields with farms and livestock and roadside vendors and flea markets. In the early evening we'll arrive in Kelowna and the northern tip of Lake Okanagan, travel south along the lake to wine country or more specifically, Penticton.

Now... I adore my children. I treasure memories of our family holidays. I look forward to vacations and getaways when the children are excited and get to experience wonderful new places. Invariably though, there are pee breaks, snack breaks, and movie changes. There are fights over 'you're in my space!' and crying jags when a small bum begins to fall asleep and then there is our faithfull puker, the poor child who suffers from motion sickness.

For a parent, a trip without your child can be as restful as a day at the spa. No headaches, no interruptions, no whining, no crying and no puking. You can eat at grown up restaurants and drive for six hours straight if your bladder allows it.

I take a book and a couple of magazines and my sunglasses. I kick off my shoes, roll down my window and stick my foot out and I savor every breath of fresh mountain and forest air. I stretch out in the sunshine and devour my books. I write and think and dream and plan.

And I stare at my sweetheart.

We make small talk. We laugh and playfight. We share our excitement. We hold hands. We watch for wildlife and choose our rest-stop together. We kiss. We talk about our goals and what we love about our family. What we need to work on as parents, partners and people. We drive for miles and say absolutely nothing. We talk about grown up things; aging parents, work committments and our siblings. We reminisce. We let our exhaustion play out. We get emotional. We reconnect. We pull off the road and fool around. We fall in love.

We sleep late. Enjoy coffee in the sun. Dress fancy. Eat in great restaurants. Walk in the sand. Talk about nothing. Enjoy each other. Have dynamite sex. Watch movies. Order in room service. We miss our children. We talk about our children. We get emotional. We're hopeless.

I feel sorry for couples who never make time to break away from their children. Or who don't recognize that time away together is a must. All of sudden one morning they wake up and little Susie is nine and they'd rather spit at each other than spend four nights alone together. It happens. I can see perfectly how easily it could happen.

It is required time. It is necessary for the survival of our relationship. In day to day life I begin to take him forgranted. We become parenting machines, one goes one way, the other goes the other way. We crawl into bed at night too exhausted to chat about the day let alone fire up any kind of spark that could lead to anything else! Over a period of days, weeks and then months we become roommates, sharing bathroom and kitchen space. We visit about work, deadlines and childrearing. The love is there, its just hidden under a layer of other stuff. We forget how much we adore each other.

But it's our time. And we're long overdue.
Eight more sleeps.