New Eyes

"The real voyage of discovery
consists not in seeking new landscapes,
but in having new eyes."

It's almost April, which means it's practically May, which means summer vacation is around the corner and I feel the movement to start planning and scheduling. Heaven forbid we have a summer where we just sit and do nothing. It sounds romantic to be very que sera sera about summer break but I know that two hours in to letting whims and fancy dictate our days there will be fighting and boredom. And that makes me feel like my nerve endings are made of chalkboard and the sound of kid's displeased voices nails screeching down my nervous system.

I don't want to travel a lot this summer. We were gone for most of the summer last year and it was tiring. Fun, sure but pretty exhausting. I didn't cope very well. In September I hit a real low point in my life and that lead to a really emotionally awful October. So, I am not going to do that again. I also don't have a lot of money to haul four kids anywhere exotic. I did thing about driving to Washington D.C. but I have visions of CK hitch-hiking home after a few days in the car, leaving us desolate somewhere in middle America. He would never do that for the record, but I bet he'd want to.

Today I was reading Instagram as you do, and I saw a comment from a very nice person who said that she follows me because I live in a beautiful state. I think that was one of the complimentary things I have heard on that particular social platform. She isn't following me because she has expectations of how I look, or how my house is, or what I say--she just likes the way I see my home. Isn't that lovely?

Utah is remarkable that way. In two hours you could be scaling desert rocks or sitting in a natural hot springs in central Utah or wiggling through lava tubes and picking up obsidian chunks. Just this month I have scaled a huge natural arch, sat snowy-side in an Alpine mountain resort cafe, waded through cascading waterfall pools in the arid desert, and watched a nightly star emerge directly at the top of the mountains in my own backyard.

So, I think it might be a chill summer for us learning to see differently what we've already seen before. I'd like to go back to some spots where we've found magic to see what else we can see. And maybe we'll hit up the BYU baseball park for some games (and hot dogs). The kids are signed up for a neighborhood drama camp which will end in a performance on Saturday morning in June. And we'll have lots of dinners under our twinkle light canopy in the backyard. CK makes the best homemade fries. Doesn't that sound lovely?

I think so too.






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