...what do you say?
Obviously, we never cracked open the laptop. We had a great time, but didn't take so many pictures as to need to empty a compact flash card (we just switched). We read - a lot. We spent time at the beach. We hung out at campfires with friends, family, and by ourselves. We sang. We walked. We rode our bikes. We poked around a used bookstore.
(We also shopped for groceries, cooked meals, cleaned up, washed and dried dishes, swept the trailer floor 10 times a day, did laundry, made beds...the work doesn't go away just because you're on vacation.)
I never cracked open an Enki book, and I never got the CDs onto my iPod. We worked on number charts one day.
I'll be honest...I didn't miss my blog that much. I still "write" in my head all of the time, but I wasn't thinking much about Enki or homeschooling or any of that. I did miss my friends, both those I see in the flesh and those I know online. I didn't even begin to wonder what they were up to on the message boards I sometimes frequent. I did wonder if I had email; but when I got home, of the 256 messages I received most were spam, a couple of dozen were from a curriculum swap group, and maybe 8 were from real people (including the homeschool list). I obviously wasn't missing much.
So I am feeling a bit adrift. Coming home is always so unreal - my house seems huge and decidedly *not* simple. Our basic rhythmic framework is rock solid, but right now chaos reigns in terms of having stuff everywhere, beds unmade, dishes in the sink, groceries that need to be purchased. Still, my first load of laundry for the day is up on the line (not a good drying day), and the second is in the washer.
I'm not sure what I want to do today. Do I reclaim my house? Finish the book I am reading? Read one of the five magazines that arrived while I was gone? Spend some time with the Enki Math book that also arrived? Drag the boys out to the grocery store(s)? Catch up Quicken and figure out how much we spent?
One thing that is clear to me is that we have not simplified enough. I always feel this way after a camping trip, but this time I feel it more intensely as I was already downsizing and simplifying. I love my house, but I feel that I want less. I hate this housing market, where everything is hyperinflated and even small houses cost a fortune. And we don't even know if we want to stay here...but that is just a seed beginning to germinate.
We left pleasant beach temperatures and cool breezes and came home to both heat and humidity. It's the kind of humidity that we rarely have, and it makes us run into the house to hibernate. We had to run the A/C to cool the house and used 25(!) kilowatt hours of electricity in 18 hours.
Perhaps if I can collect my thoughts I will write more later....
I remember this feeling! When we travel away from our day to day, especially for an extended period it is always so difficult to fall back into home, not because of the disorder as much as the sense that things seem so trivial. I remember returning from our three week camping tour of the Southeast and it took me almost a week before I could even call people and hear about the ins and outs of life. I was still so disconnected from it all.
ReplyDeleteFinish your book, ease back into life slowly, it is summer after all. :-)
Glad your back, I missed the updates and the motivation! :-)