On coming home

We are home, safe and sound. Sunday afternoon we rolled into Houston after a crashing at Renovare, the beautiful home of our dear friends Tom and Laura in Hunstville. These wonderful people offer their lake-side home in the country as a retreat to friends and family and as I was reaching a place where I couldn’t continue driving we called and asked to stop there for the night and they graciously set-up beds for us and gave us a warm and comfortable place to stay the night. We were so well taken care of and wished we could have stayed for the baptism taking place in their backyard Sunday morning following the worship gathering of their church but E’s tummy bug and our extended absence from home put us on the road midmorning.

It was strange coming home. Jeremy and Helena had split up from the rest of us for him to drop the van off to be checked out so 4 of us got to the house alone. The leaves had almost all fallen from our big tree out front giving us a crunchy carpet leading to the house and we immediately got to add those leaves to our living room when we tracked a bunch in. The house seemed strangely still and quiet and when we found the keys left by our friends we let ourselves in. You know what my first thought was? Not “oh, it is so good to be home!” or “I hate coming home to a messy house” (though I really do and tried to avoid it, it was very clean 2 days before we left but then the girls’ packing moved out into the living room and we were sunk) not even a thought of relief and happy to sleep in my own bed after nearly a month. Nope. Those totally normal responses to coming home after a long trip which most people have weren’t even on my radar which of course means I’m not normal. Shocking revelation, I know. Instead, my first thought was “Ugh, I hate these walls, I’m so painting this week.” All while unloading the van and house cleaning to get rid of the closed house smell I fantasized about colors. Jeremy called to let me know how things were going and I informed him about my ideas, he took it in stride particularly considering he hadn’t even been home yet. Ok, ok, he laughed at me. Fine. But then he was pretty cool about it. Even when I said I wanted to paint the walls deep purple.

So we’ve been home for about 4 days now and have already found ourselves adjusting back to the old routine pretty well. By adjusting I mean “Look, chaos continues to reign!” This is normal for us, thank you. The girls were thrilled to get back to their homeschool programs on Monday and Wednesday, granted, the reason they were excited to get back had more to do with their friends than the classes but hey, excited to “go to school” works for me, whatever the motivation. I have yet to do real grocery shopping, I’m dreading it so we’re doing the “run to the store for a few things” to get us through meals. Tomorrow I have to bite the bullet and actually go shopping, the list is in progress and frighteningly long but a menu plan is being laid out to keep me from forgetting anything or getting too overwhelmed. Yeah, right. The poor girls, our limited food options mean that almost everything they ask to eat is met with “we don’t have that.” There will be mutiny if I don’t go shopping soon.

Going back through my France posts I realized how completely boring they were without pictures. This weekend I’ll be making brief posts (in between grocery shopping, tree decorating and painting- yes, we are actually painting the living room!) sharing some of our photos from the trip. They won’t be the “look, here is the Eiffel Tower” type posts, use google images if you want to see stuff like that, they’re better anyway. They’ll be more of the “isn’t that cool graffiti and look, there’s the castle grounds Jeremy grew up on, isn’t that just sick?” type of pics. Hope you enjoy!