This week, I took my six year old daughter Anna to a competitive gymnastics’ camp, 500 miles away from our home. She’s too young to stay overnight so we, myself and her four sisters, had to go with her. My husband and I had originally planned that I would take Anna to the camp with the baby while he took a few days of leave to stay with the other three girls, but because of his unexpected deployment I had to figure out a way to make this trip on my own.
I’ve written before about my frustration with my husband’s intense deployment schedule, which hasn’t slowed down in the least, and as the time for this camp approached and my daughter’s excitement grew, I decided that I wouldn’t let the military change our plans, so we went anyway.
Traveling with five little ones isn’t relaxing, but we made the best of it.
My six year old enjoyed her camp and got to meet some professional gymnasts and Olympic athletes. She was thrilled. Her sisters and I spent time in the pool at our hotel, visited children’s museums, the zoo, the aquarium and a few other fun spots. We even managed to visit a friend and fellow writer and see her super cute children and little baby.
These little outings were often accompanied by meltdowns and some fighting, but overall we made it back unscathed and happy.
The hardest part thing about the trip was the actual eight hour drive to and from the camp. I didn’t want to get tired or sleepy, and kept drinking caffeinated beverages which required bathroom stops and having to unbuckle and get everyone back in the car with lots of complaints and the kids’ most favorite sentence, “Are we there yet?” The kids fought incessantly while cooped up in our van.
They argued about anything that came to their minds, including the fact that while watching Max and Ruby on our small car TV only one of them could pretend to be Max while the others all had to be Ruby.
Our actual stay was without many problems. We were able to book a room at a base hotel, which was fairly close to my daughter’s camp. It was nice to be around military people, use the commissary and the base pool with lots of kids around.
The thought of wanting my husband around more than one or two months out of every year came to my mind as I carried our luggage up three flights of stairs in our hotel, which didn’t have an elevator. I thought about my better half again when I couldn’t open the crib because it was stuck and required far more strength that I could muster – the nice gentleman working at the hotel reception opened it for me.
On this trip my youngest daughter also took her first steps and as I tried to capture her wobbly walk on my video camera and in pictures, I thought about how much I really wished I could have shared this moment with my husband.
I have two more trips this summer one to Chicago and another one to Dallas. I’m sure we’ll make it all right, but I’ll still miss my husband every mile of our journey.
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I was all ready to ask you if you meant BlogHer, but I see the big button staring at me next to the comments. That answers that question. And yay! I hope I get to run into you there.
Any chance you’ll be passing through airports in Denver, San Diego, or Atlanta? Maybe me and my 3 might run into you and your 5! I am already scared of my upcoming trip, I don’t know how you do it. And I know how unhelpful that phrase sounds when non-military friends say it to me . . .
That’s about the only way we travel. I actually relish the time my husband is gone because in the summer I can take the boys and go see family with abandon. There is no Army or work schedule to work around. We can just pick up and go. In fact I was going to take them somewhere while he’s TDY in July, but we found out last weekend our toddler doe NOT travel well, so I’m skipping it. I can have sleepless nights at home just as well and not have to drive back. Maybe next time.
Eight hours in a vehicle with any number of small children would be enough to drive anyone right back up the driveway into a “staycation” instead. Congrats to you for going on your trip anyway and I’m glad you all had a good time.
Whatcha heading to Dallas for? A conference perhaps where you will speak to your adoring fans about writing? If so, let me know – I live in that area and would love to meet ya!
Peace,
Kathleen
I admire how you were able to keep your sanity during this trip. We drive the three kids to visit my in-laws. It’s a long 12-hour drive. By the time we arrive, my nerves are frazzled.
I so agree with what you’ve written. I came across this the other day and it really helped me.
Romans 8 (The Message)
Romans 8
The Solution Is Life on God’s Terms
1-2With the arrival of Jesus, the Messiah, that fateful dilemma is resolved. Those who enter into Christ’s being-here-for-us no longer have to live under a continuous, low-lying black cloud. A new power is in operation. The Spirit of life in Christ, like a strong wind, has magnificently cleared the air, freeing you from a fated lifetime of brutal tyranny at the hands of sin and death.
3-4God went for the jugular when he sent his own Son. He didn’t deal with the problem as something remote and unimportant. In his Son, Jesus, he personally took on the human condition, entered the disordered mess of struggling humanity in order to set it right once and for all. The law code, weakened as it always was by fractured human nature, could never have done that.
The law always ended up being used as a Band-Aid on sin instead of a deep healing of it. And now what the law code asked for but we couldn’t deliver is accomplished as we, instead of redoubling our own efforts, simply embrace what the Spirit is doing in us.
5-8Those who think they can do it on their own end up obsessed with measuring their own moral muscle but never get around to exercising it in real life. Those who trust God’s action in them find that God’s Spirit is in them—living and breathing God! Obsession with self in these matters is a dead end; attention to God leads us out into the open, into a spacious, free life. Focusing on the self is the opposite of focusing on God. Anyone completely absorbed in self ignores God, ends up thinking more about self than God. That person ignores who God is and what he is doing. And God isn’t pleased at being ignored.
9-11But if God himself has taken up residence in your life, you can hardly be thinking more of yourself than of him. Anyone, of course, who has not welcomed this invisible but clearly present God, the Spirit of Christ, won’t know what we’re talking about. But for you who welcome him, in whom he dwells—even though you still experience all the limitations of sin—you yourself experience life on God’s terms. It stands to reason, doesn’t it, that if the alive-and-present God who raised Jesus from the dead moves into your life, he’ll do the same thing in you that he did in Jesus, bringing you alive to himself? When God lives and breathes in you (and he does, as surely as he did in Jesus), you are delivered from that dead life. With his Spirit living in you, your body will be as alive as Christ’s!
12-14So don’t you see that we don’t owe this old do-it-yourself life one red cent. There’s nothing in it for us, nothing at all. The best thing to do is give it a decent burial and get on with your new life. God’s Spirit beckons. There are things to do and places to go!
15-17This resurrection life you received from God is not a timid, grave-tending life. It’s adventurously expectant, greeting God with a childlike “What’s next, Papa?” God’s Spirit touches our spirits and confirms who we really are. We know who he is, and we know who we are: Father and children. And we know we are going to get what’s coming to us—an unbelievable inheritance! We go through exactly what Christ goes through. If we go through the hard times with him, then we’re certainly going to go through the good times with him!
18-21That’s why I don’t think there’s any comparison between the present hard times and the coming good times. The created world itself can hardly wait for what’s coming next. Everything in creation is being more or less held back. God reins it in until both creation and all the creatures are ready and can be released at the same moment into the glorious times ahead. Meanwhile, the joyful anticipation deepens.
22-25All around us we observe a pregnant creation. The difficult times of pain throughout the world are simply birth pangs. But it’s not only around us; it’s within us. The Spirit of God is arousing us within. We’re also feeling the birth pangs. These sterile and barren bodies of ours are yearning for full deliverance. That is why waiting does not diminish us, any more than waiting diminishes a pregnant mother. We are enlarged in the waiting. We, of course, don’t see what is enlarging us. But the longer we wait, the larger we become, and the more joyful our expectancy.
26-28Meanwhile, the moment we get tired in the waiting, God’s Spirit is right alongside helping us along. If we don’t know how or what to pray, it doesn’t matter. He does our praying in and for us, making prayer out of our wordless sighs, our aching groans. He knows us far better than we know ourselves, knows our pregnant condition, and keeps us present before God. That’s why we can be so sure that every detail in our lives of love for God is worked into something good.
29-30God knew what he was doing from the very beginning. He decided from the outset to shape the lives of those who love him along the same lines as the life of his Son. The Son stands first in the line of humanity he restored. We see the original and intended shape of our lives there in him. After God made that decision of what his children should be like, he followed it up by calling people by name. After he called them by name, he set them on a solid basis with himself. And then, after getting them established, he stayed with them to the end, gloriously completing what he had begun.
31-39So, what do you think? With God on our side like this, how can we lose? If God didn’t hesitate to put everything on the line for us, embracing our condition and exposing himself to the worst by sending his own Son, is there anything else he wouldn’t gladly and freely do for us? And who would dare tangle with God by messing with one of God’s chosen? Who would dare even to point a finger? The One who died for us—who was raised to life for us!—is in the presence of God at this very moment sticking up for us. Do you think anyone is going to be able to drive a wedge between us and Christ’s love for us? There is no way! Not trouble, not hard times, not hatred, not hunger, not homelessness, not bullying threats, not backstabbing, not even the worst sins listed in Scripture:
They kill us in cold blood because they hate you.
We’re sitting ducks; they pick us off one by one.
None of this fazes us because Jesus loves us. I’m absolutely convinced that nothing—nothing living or dead, angelic or demonic, today or tomorrow, high or low, thinkable or unthinkable—absolutely nothing can get between us and God’s love because of the way that Jesus our Master has embraced us.
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