Yay – I’m home!

Got back last night around 10:30. We go up camping every year to a little campground on the ocean in Maine. My mother LOVES it up there, she looks forward to it every year, and my sister is following in her footsteps – they both come prepared with everything you could possibly need, and seem to thrive on it. I camp reluctantly – I love the ocean and I love the unstructured time, the hours spent on the beach, the way Jess just lights up when she’s there. But the bugs – and the dirt, and the rain – yes, I freely admit it, I am a total wuss when it comes to camping. My stepsister lives about twenty minutes from her house, and this year, we slept at her house. PERFECT – all the joys of camping, long days at the beach, time spent with family – but a real shower, a bedroom with real walls and an actual mattress with sheets on it to sleep on.

The weather was blissful on Monday morning, bright, hot, sunshiney beautiful, and Jess immediately found her camping buddy (a little girl her age from Vermont who coincidentally is up there every year at the same time). The girls had a blast, my brother was up there as well, with his three kids, as well as my sister and her daughter. Everyone had bikes, and it was just a perfect kind of day. Yesterday was cold and rainy and yucky. I left Jess on island with her buddy and my brother, and my mother, cousin, sister-in-law and Sam went into Bath to bop around, have lunch and just hang out. We got back to the campground, and it was just gross weather. My cousin came up – he’s got three girls, the oldest is Sam’s age, and he’s got twin nine month old girls, so we played with the babies for a while, but when they left, I looked at Becky and asked if she felt like driving home that night. We changed the kids, packed them in the car with snacks and they fell asleep almost immediately, slept the entire three hour trip home and stayed asleep once we got here. It was perfect 🙂

For me, the best part of the trip was the drive back. Both kids were asleep and my cousin Becky and I talked the entire time. Grown up talk, about marriages and relationships and memories and life – there’s literally nobody else in the world who knows me the way that she does and gets where I’ve come from, where I am now, and where I’m going. One of the things that my life is definitely missing is grown up girl time – I love an awful lot about my life, wouldn’t trade Marc and the kids for anything – but I miss my girl time. So it was especially nice to have that uninterrupted time to talk with my favorite cousin 🙂