Gindi Vincent

The Dish on Career, Fashion, Faith, and Family

four weekends

Four Weekends: No. 4

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You made it! I feel like Grover in the Monster at the End of the Book! You made it all the way to the last of the four weekends away!

Weekend one – celebrating the kids.

Weekend two – family time.

Weekend three – girls trip.

Weekend four – family friends.

That’s right, today we’re talking about the gift of family friends.

You may have gathered if you’ve read me over the years that Bray and I are VERY different. Country/city. Politics. Free time. Hobbies.

All different.

What weaves us together other than love and attraction which we still thankfully have 16 years in is common values. Faith. Family. Morals.

But because we are so different and because we have kids of both genders, it was really hard to find family friends. People where Bray connected with the husband, I connected with the wife, and the kids connected with each other.

When we came to our current school, the kids were in first grade, and we found family friends for the first time. Really dear and meaningful friendships which continue to this day. Some families have left and some have joined but I feel tremendously grateful for some core families with whom we adore spending time.

One of those precious families invited us out to their lake house on Canyon Lake. It’s a gorgeous lake in the Hill Country we hadn’t ever visited before. With all the activity of October, we weren’t sure we were going to make it, but luckily we did.

All we had to do was pack a bag and drive up. We threw some wine and appetizers in the car but the wife had meals all planned out. Casual and easy but delicious. The husband drove a super fun boat and the kids swam and tubed and surfed off the boat waves.

While the kids explored the area, the grown ups sat on the wrap around porch and drank coffee and visited in that decadent unhurried way. We laughed and unwound. We watched sports and played pickleball (I love it and am supremely awful) and had loud competitions on the vintage foosball table.

Even my husband, who would almost always prefer to be at the ranch or the farm, remarked on our way home what a fabulous time it was.

Adults don’t get to have long swaths of time to laugh and goof off and hear each other’s stories. We squeeze it in here or there over a drink or in between cheering for our kids team.

You know me. I don’t want to mess around with the small talk. I want to get into your STORY. Deep. All the gory details. This weekend was a gift of stories and history and joy.

We all felt lighter afterwards. And more connected. And most of all, grateful. Grateful for the families God has placed into our lives to enrich it and make it more colorful.

Each of these four weekends gave us something back. I’m so thankful we had each of them.

Four Weekends: No. 3

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Here we are, already at Weekend No. 3! I started this four weekend series with No. 1, celebrating the kids. Then yesterday covered No. 2, family time!

Today, I’m talking about a favorite topic: GIRLFRIENDS! Weekend No. 3 was a much needed, much overdue girls trip.

I won’t get into the details of how it totally came together last minute for me, or how a friend of mine invited me even though I didn’t know the other women on the trip.

What I will say is that it was absolutely perfect. Six women. All within about a decade in age (with me being the senior citizen). All working momma lawyers. But even more, deep women of faith, with great interests, varied musical tastes, and a love of wine and coffee.

These were my people.

The crazy thing is, this is the only weekend that would have even worked. October is mayhem with work and sports and birthdays. But early one Friday morning, I hopped on a flight using my frequent flyer miles, and zipped up to Northern California for a weekend in Sonoma, my favorite part of wine country.

I really think we could have plopped down anywhere though.

We ate great food, drank great wine, and had important conversations about careers and societal issues and parenting and love and faith and more.

I feel like the theme of each of these four posts is uninterrupted.

Life, most days, is a series of constant interruptions. This time was uninterrupted. We didn’t have to pick a restaurant our kids would enjoy. We didn’t have to run interference for a fight (with kids or clients). No eating in a hurry at our desk.

Nope. It was leisurely. All planned out. We just showed up at each stop. Ate, drank, laughed and talked. In long unhurried segments of time.

I woke up in the morning and took my coffee and phone outside to a massive backyard overlooking a vineyard. I put my favorite praise music on the phone and sat. Took deep breaths. Ingested the beauty. Absorbed the peace.

We don’t do this. Especially we working mommas. We’re notoriously terrible at this. We’ll go years without sitting still. Even today, writing this post, I am MAKING myself sit at my computer while the kids are out on a Sunday afternoon. I have a ton of things to do but I really want to write. Love to write.

But there’s no time. To take deep breaths. To have deep thoughts.

Then we went out. To great dinners (highly recommend The Girl and The Fig). To great vineyards (highly recommend Repris for the experience and Merry Edwards for the pinot). We listened to 90s country and sang songs I didn’t even know I knew. I laughed so much. I don’t laugh nearly as much as I used to and I’m going to work on that.

This weekend was a gift. At a time that could not have been more perfect. Right before a major life change. Right before the frenzied holiday season, full of goodness but also chaos.

The women were a gift. Each of them was interesting, thoughtful, beautiful, funny, insightful, gracious, and really pretty fabulous. We just got together again this week to catch up and celebrate our shipment of wine by cracking some open.

I did nothing to deserve such a gorgeous, joy-filled weekend away, but I’m overwhelmingly, unspeakable grateful for its coming.

Four Weekends: No. 2

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Yesterday, I debuted my four weekend series of posts. I’m highlighting the four straight weekends I was out of town in October. How each of them play a part in our greater growth and community if we’ll make room for these times and relationships.

Weekend One – celebrating the kids!

Weekend Two – family time.

Bray loves the ranch. I much prefer the farm in Louisiana where his parents live, but he loves the more rustic ranch in south Texas.

I used to go more but I’ll admit that I don’t go often now. Life’s commitments and lack of ‘comforts of home’ mean that I don’t head down to Seadrift more than once a year, usually.

After Bray and I got engaged (Halloween 2005), we spent New Year’s Eve down at the ranch with his family. While there, we took our engagement pictures. Tractors and barns and fields with trees made for a picture perfect background. This year, I’d settled that I wanted to retake those photos with the kids. Bray turning 50 and the kids turning 12 and going to middle school made it a must do. I didn’t even know when I picked this year that we’d also be celebrating me beating cancer.

So we all packed up and headed down. There are fences to mend and cows to work and I’m not particularly good at any of that ranch work. I was able to catch up on some reading and make meals which was restorative on it’s own.

More importantly, there are no interruptions. There’s no cable tv. No internet. No close neighbors. No activities. No to do list. The kids are outside until dark and then we’re building a fire and chatting around the table in the one room ranch house.

As the kids get older, we often separate. Bray takes one or two or none and same for me. We are together weekday evenings for dinner but it’s often rushed and hectic with sports and homework and Bray and my jobs.

At the ranch though, it’s just us. The five of us. One little unit with no competing activities to divide us. As the kids get older, I’m more and more grateful for the moments we find together. And the kids even humored me with matching outfits and smiles under the tree and in the barn. (More to come on that in our Christmas card/letter this week!)

It’s busy. This life. But weekend two gave us a time out we all needed.

Four Weekends: No. 1

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This October, I was out of town every single weekend. Four weekends in a row.

I’ve wanted to write about each of them. As I began to map out my posts, I realized they were a tapestry of what we need.

Ideally, they don’t all come right in a row because, you know, meal prep, house cleaning, catch up, etc.

But with great fortune, they each come.

Weekend One – celebrating kids. Intentional focused time on them. Weekend Two – family time. Time uninterrupted by life’s chaos. Weekend Three – girls weekend. Away time with friends to laugh and have good wine and talk about the big issues of life. Weekend Four – family friends. Time to spend with husbands and wives and kids that everyone in your family connects with and enjoys.

So I’ll cover each of them over the next few days. And I realize a romantic getaway with your person isn’t on there. That’s needed too. The reality is that it doesn’t come every year. Maybe it’s just a date night every quarter that tides you over.

The first weekend of October we celebrated the triplets turning 12! TWELVE! It’s almost impossible to imagine. I started blogging the month the trio turned one. I read over that first birthday blog post love letter when they were 2 and can’t even process how fast it’s all gone.

Instead of having a crazy big birthday party like we did ten years ago, or two years ago, all the kids wanted was to each bring a friend to the farm to fish and camp and visit the horses. I’d told them the next big birthday would be their sweet 16, so until then we do something fun with a six kids (when each kid gets to pick one friend, you land at 6!).

Bray was totally the man of the hour.

He was ON the whole weekend. It was a ton of work because he was the boat captain. We have this tiny aluminum boat at the farm, it’s been Bray’s family fishing boat since he was a kid, and Bray captains it through the gorgeous overgrown bayous and into the larger Gulf-fed waters until they find fish. This time, the kids jug-lined instead of traditional fishing and it was a HUGE hit. The kids said it was the best fishing they’d ever had and boy did they find some fish.

The four boys and Bray camped out down at the camp house which was in between tenants and the girls and I stayed up with Bray’s parents at the main house.

There were presents and desserts (pie and maccrons, per request) and gumbo and donuts, but most of all there was fishing. Fishing on Saturday and fishing on Sunday. The videos from the trip are some of the funniest I’ve ever watched. And while I stayed back at the house managing meals, Bray did the heavy lifting entertaining the kids on the boat.

There were some hiccups.

Stanley (our DOG who you know my feelings on) disappeared. He does this. He usually picks major events like birthdays to try and ruin (he ran away the night of Bray’s 50th birthday party this summer). When the kids got back from the fishing trip late Saturday afternoon, Stanley was nowhere to be found. He loves the farm and really doesn’t leave the main grounds when we’re there. The kids were beside themselves, esp the eldest. So, after an exhaustive search on the four wheeler, Bray agreed to take the boys out to search the bayou. Lo and behold, Stanley had followed them in the marsh, jumped across the bayou and was stuck on the other side in high water reeds. That dog has nine lives. He was safely returned no worse for wear.

Then, when we headed home, we hit a major detour. Bray had to come home Monday morning so it was me and six sixth graders. The trip from the farm to Houston is about two and a half hours. I left extra early, noon on Sunday, so I could be back in time to speak at church worship that night at 5 pm. After we got through Beaumont, traffic STOPPED. Not slowed. Stopped.

Turns out, the great state of Texas had decided to CLOSE Interstate 10 on Sunday afternoon. What could go wrong? After a noon departure, I dropped the kids back at their homes at 6:30 PM! That’s right, nearly seven hours in the car.

And yet. I have to say this was one of my favorite parts of the birthday weekend. All of these kids are massively awesome. The baby’s best friend crawled up in the front seat, swapping with the eldest’s best friend, and decided we’d have a sing along. Since we were parked on I-10, we rolled down the windows, waved at the cars around us, tried to get truckers to honk, and gave a Gatorade to a stranded motorcyclist.

And we SANG. At the top of our lungs. I have video proof. The song selection was HYSTERICAL! Y’all, these twelve year olds gave me hope for humanity. We had 12 year old boys singing Let it Go and Avocado. When we arrived at one of the houses (they all live in the neighborhood so I had an easy drop off), little bit’s best pal hoped out of the car and said I would totally do that drive again!

I can’t even with their awesomeness.

The thing I loved about this trip was really spending uninterrupted time with the kids and their friends. Their closest pals. Who are so cool. And interesting. And funny. At parties, I’m catching up with their parents. At sporting events, we’re all cheering. But on this farm weekend, we were having meals and conversations (extra long ones on the ride home) about a wide array of topics.

So weekend one was a huge success. Thanks largely to Bray and a passel of amazing kiddos. A twelfth birthday for the record books!