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.