So my night started out nice and relaxing, with a mostly clean house, lots of time reading with the children and early bed for all of them. Then the work began. I had to run to the grocery store to buy more cake mix & other things for our party tomorrow night. Then I baked the cake. I got an itch to make my new friend a birthday present so I started on that. Got to a point in both projects that I had nothing to do for an hour, so I watched random girlie TV before getting back to work.
I almost finished a really awesome Wonder Woman cake (photos to come later just in case my friend happens to read this blog before tomorrow night). And I'm almost done with her present. My night turned into a practice run for staying up past midnight for the New Year. I was successful but really started feeling it by 12:30am. So I left everything as is and headed for bed. Now an hour later I'm lying awake with my head swimming... I loose so much sleep when my head swims.
A week from today I will be preparing my house for my mother & step-father to be here. They will sleep in our bed, and be responsible for our children for the better part of 6 days all by themselves. Jason and I will be going on a cruise. Sounds like a really awesome deal but I'll be incapable of getting on a plane or hoping in a car and being home within a few hours in case of an emergency. Different from our usual trips. Add that to flashbacks of Titantic and well... Let the swimming begin!
So I was lying in bed praying before sleep overcame me, and I was in a particularly thankful mood for my husband. And that lead to being thankful for our children and that led me to panic about leaving them for the cruise next week. I'm not exactly anti-cruise, but it's not one of my 'I have to do that before I die' things. Jason has expressed great desire to do a cruise and he likes it when we take little trips together so I thought it'd be perfect. Of course I thought that when the cruise was 4 months away... now? Not so much.
Is this the normal jitters? Probably. I can't remember how exactly I managed to leave my babies for nearly 6 days to go to New York or London or Austin. But I did. Each time panicking a little. Each time preparing some sort of token for the children to remember us by. A new toy with a special note, a fresh journal entry, a photo album, whatever I could think of to sort of freeze that moment in time for them. Just in case we didn't come back I wanted them to know that we loved them and give them something tangible to hold a memory of us. I know it's silly since they are so young, but Alexander has always appreciated these gifts and held them dear each time, almost confirming he understood his responsibility while we were gone was to take care of his siblings.
And now I'm reliving these fears again, and new ones with this particular boat scenerio. Those supper sad and creepy thoughts that I won't be coming back are haunting me. Maybe I won't get the privelage of raising our babies. I'll abandon them despite all my efforts to do exactly the opposite. I won't be there to watch the people they will become. Of course they'd be different people without use raising them. They'd have very different obstacles than we will give them to overcome. I'm sure God will speak to them, I pray they find comfort in Him and love Him with all their being. One of our greatest desires for them. But not being there to take the others to Kindergarten, to tuck them in each night, to pick them up when they fall down. To comfort them after their first heartbreak, to cheer them on in their sporting efforts, to help them build a clubhouse. To teach them how to drive, to watch them walk across the stage at graduation, to move them into their college dorm room, to walk them down the isle, to hold our grandbabies... all things that I dream of will become impossible.
As I sit here in tears thinking about all that I MIGHT miss I realize something. These are all my selfish desires. These things are the fondant that makes the cake of life look so pretty and put together. And I so desperately want these things, I love pretty cake, I think it actually makes it taste just a little bit better. But if we don't make choices to add eggs to the flour and put the cake batter in the oven there won't be a cake for the fondant to cover. So I have to continue to trust God. Trust Him that my mother & step father will do a wonderful job caring for our children, that they will all have fun while we are gone, that we will be safe on our trip, carried by the hand of God and returned safely, rested, refreshed and reconnected, ready to continue raising these beautiful babies He's given us and accomplish the mission of loving those around us.
Wow, not sure if it's writing it out loud or all the tears letting the water out but my head has stopped swimming for now. And oddly enough the cruise and sleep are starting to sound like a good idea again.
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