Maintenance and Rest (which is part of Maintenance) – Days 9 & 10

Something I hadn’t thought of while planning all my trips is that we don’t just need a day of rest each week, but a day(s) of maintenance.  Anyone who knows me knows that I’m the world’s worst housekeeper and have taught my children my skills.  The RV was a wreck when we finally woke up on Friday morning.  After our 3 day amusement park bender, it really did feel like a bender.  Clothes and food wrappers we thrown all over the RV, we were laying in our beds to sleep it off.  It was crazy.  We needed to do laundry, clean the RV, take out the trash, SHOWER, grocery shop, and write this wonderful blog for YOU. Plus I’d promised Mermaid Zoe that I’d take her to the beach.  It took much longer to do those chores since we didn’t have time to pick up a scrap of trash all week.  Plus it was nice to not have to be somewhere.

If I could redo this, I definitely would have broken my 3 days up with a rest day in between, there wasn’t an easy way I could have done that, but I could have.  I needed rest and with all the maintenance to the RV and such I still didn’t get a ton of rest.  We went to the beach later and that was fun, but again, I had to be the lifeguard so it was’t completely restful.  Plus I got seashells and sand …. nevermind.  Anyway, we woke up on Saturday with nothing to do.  I couldn’t get tickets to 2 different places (I’m so not crying about that) and I wanted to take the kids to the La Brea Tar Pits, but, that didn’t happen, either.  In fact, we ended up hanging out in the RV almost the entire day on Saturday, playing on the computer, cleaning, and watching movie!  It was Saturday in Anaheim in 75 degree weather and we were watching a movie in the RV.  I took the girls swimming for an hour later (which was basically the only “thing” we did… Also we went to Shakey’s Pizza).  Ah rest.

When I get back there are so many things I need to work into the first 3 month leg of our trip.  I had worked 1 day of rest into each week, but now I’m going to have to scrap a lot of the “cool” things we were going to do and add another maintenance day into the week, as well.

Adam never did things on Sundays (except Church) and he rested all the time.  He worked hard, ran hard, and rested hard.  I never understood it, but after he died I did.  He was decompressing and it’s how he survived life.  I never learned how to rest.  I remember being a 15 year old babysitter and having to “schedule” rest days for myself and not babysit on those days.  If I didn’t, I’d get a cold.  Something over the years changed and I could never stop going.

I need to make this coming trip about rest, healing and learning, God and family and maybe other things will fall into place. Maybe it’s not about seeing everything in the country, but getting what we need out of this trip and enjoying ourselves even if we don’t see/do it all….