Six months ago, spring hadn't even sprung yet. We were fresh off Jacob's high school basketball run through sectionals and a state qualifier. March had been a relatively quiet month otherwise, the calm before the storm. Well, event-wise it was calm. My brain, on the other hand, was a swirling mess of stress and most of that "free" time was spent planning and pondering the insane travel we had coming up. And as such, the first bit of April was a complete blur:
Fly to Springfield, MO. Two days of basketball, but only one game played due to injury. Drive back to Rochester 15-1/2 hours over two days. Fly to Oklahoma City three days later. Drive to and from Tulsa while we're there. Two days of basketball, another injury. See the Chihuly exhibit and Oklahoma City bombing memorial to salvage something positive from the trip. Fly home, find out the injury is a broken leg bone, cancel the trip in two weeks.
To think we almost added a third trip (to Wichita, of all places) to that mess boggles my mind a bit. Instead we had about a six-week break while spring actually sprung at home, and then we had our epic Indiana-St. Louis trip. By then we were in the stretch run of the school year and dealing with Jacob's school transfer and assorted injuries. That distracted us for a solid couple weeks, then suddenly school was over, July arrived, and we were off to Pittsburgh for another mini-adventure. And we all know how summer goes after the 4th of July hits...blink and it's over. My brother's family came into town, Carter and I did some Darien Lake, Zoomagination, and a bunch of playgrounds, we had two family reunions, baseball started, Carter had two weeks of soccer camp, I had a concert, and then it was our last-minute Cedar Point weekend. After that it was supposed to be full-on Disney time...until COVID hit and everything went into complete disarray for a few days. And then it was back to full-speed-ahead Disney for a week. Then it was back home, back to school, and here we are--fall is here and October is just hours away.
To say the last six months have been a whirlwind would be an understatement. There are times I look at all that we've done, re-read my posts, think about all those moments, and can't believe that all just fit into the last six months. I spent a couple solid years barely doing anything, and poof...apparently I made up for lost time. It was great in a lot of ways, but now I feel like I'm looking back on it and still processing the entire experience. Time went so fast, even though those last couple weeks before Disney dragged in their own weird way. It's like I had this time warp--ultimately everything felt fast, but April to July happened in a millisecond, and then August felt like a slo-mo slog--not just because we were waiting for Disney, but because things were relatively quiet for a few weeks and my full-time hobby was thinking about the trip. It's like I had this weird no man's land in the middle of August, an unremarkable couple-week-long dividing line between full-speed-ahead summer and the pure craziness at the end--Cedar Point, COVID, and Disney in rapid succession. School hit almost immediately upon our return, and everything has been back on fast-forward since. How is September over?
That series of events at the end of August in particular is hard for me to process. My feelings on the Cedar Point trip have been so mixed since it likely led to my COVID infection and could have ruined Disney. It was such a last-minute trip that there was no lead-up, and then it was a whirlwind three days that initially felt like a literal dream come true--something we'd talked about for years and finally, out of the blue, got to do, and it was amazing in so many ways. But two days later my test came back positive, and since then I've had a hard time looking back at those pictures or figuring out how to feel about that trip in the long run. I kept looking at my unassembled souvenir (a 2-D metal landscape of Cedar Point's skyline) still in the box on my dresser and had mixed feelings about putting it together. I finally did last weekend, and it was still a little bittersweet.
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| I do love it...even though there were dozens of tiny metal connection points that had to be carefully and awkwardly clipped with nail clippers. But it captures so much of the fun in one little panorama. |
I loved the trip for what it was, but I can't quite forgive it for what happened after. It reminds me a little of when I went to Pittsburgh just before I found out I was pregnant. I saw an amazing Chihuly exhibit in the midst of feeling pretty darn awful. I thought it was from too much food and not enough sleep, but it was actually the early stages of the first trimester blahs. Even almost 16 years later I have moments where I see those pictures and immediately and intensely recall the ickiness I felt that weekend and weight of the mental and physical challenges that followed for the next month. They're just forever linked, apparently. I feel like Cedar Point might suffer the same fate, at least until next year when we go back and can maybe overwrite the memories a bit. Anyway, add in those few weird COVID days in isolation and a crazy week of Disney, and I just can't quite wrap my brain around those couple weeks at all. It was such an emotional roller coaster...bookended by lots of actual roller coasters, haha. I'm super grateful that I managed to squeeze in so many wonderful experiences despite COVID, both in those weeks and the months prior, but wow, it's a lot to look back on. It's almost overwhelming, and when I try to focus on appreciating it all, I worry that I'm living in the past or something. How do you savor all those memories without devaluing the present? Good problem to have, I guess? I'm definitely overthinking this, I get it, but I guess I haven't had a stretch quite like this one before with so much excitement.
It's funny, because I feel like my phone's photo album from the last six months is a bit deceiving. I have a hundreds of pictures and every time I want to look at something from earlier this year I feel like I'm scrolling forever. But in truth, most of it is a handful of significant events. The in-between stuff is pretty minimal--a game or school event here and there, a couple flowers or sunsets, random little moments in time. But most of it is those massive photo dumps, which definitely make those in-betweens seem even less significant. I don't know if that's a problem that the less exciting stuff paled so much in comparison that I didn't properly document it, or if the in-between stuff really was that dull and didn't need documenting. We do seem to overdocument everything these days, thanks to social media. But most of our summer felt like low-key busyness--nothing exciting, but not exactly quiet and relaxing either. Lots of sports, therapy appointments (both Jacob and Craig), lots of work, and much-needed downtime from a busy spring. Maybe I didn't feel so compelled to go out and make the most of every summer weekend because I had my fill in the spring. Maybe time at home felt like the exception or even a luxury. I don't know, but either way the flow this summer felt completely odd to me. Time flew so fast that there were a lot of things I didn't get around to, and now I'm over here sort of kicking myself and realizing that fall usually goes fast on its own so there isn't a lot of time to make up for it...but at the same time, I'm far more content than usual just hanging at home. I think I'm just go-go'd out, but I also don't want to regret not taking advantage of good weather while we have it, so fall poses another challenge.
The last couple weeks I've been able to watch the webcams at Oktoberfest in Munich. It's one of my favorite times of year when I can peek in on that event, listen to the live feeds, and watch the attendees and carnival rides in action. I long to be there and see it myself in person. A family friend of ours posted a memory last week from seven years ago (which itself blows my mind) when my parents were there for a glorious-but-too-short hour and a half in the midst of a crazy European bus trip. I got an amazing gingerbread heart out of the deal, but I was so jealous--and often still am--and while I still really want to be there, part of me is oddly relieved I'm not this year. I think I've just had too much travel stress--be it from weather, COVID, flights, or all the other planning unknowns that make travel hard. I have had my fill. Someday I'm sure that desperate urge will return, but for now, for this one year, I'm happily watching from afar, thankful that particular stress is not part of my life right now. And incidentally, I know I will blink and it will be time to watch the Christmas market webcams again. We all know how it goes--October is full of fall-ish things, November drags a tiny bit until Thanksgiving, and then it's full-blast to Christmas. UGH. And of course I'm sitting here talking about how fast six months went, and in three months (half that time) we'll be wrapping up the post-Christmas hangover en route to the new year. Yikes. But if the past is any indication, we'll fill up these months with some good stuff, too.
Last Friday night I was mindlessly scrolling social media. It had been a long day at the end of a long week. Jacob had been sick much of the week (we think it was the flu because it was bad but not COVID or strep) and I'd done so much at work that my brain was just sort of done by mid-afternoon Friday, to the point I packed up my computer after I finished my last big project around 3:30pm, picked up Taco Bell happy hour freezes on my way home, and just monitored email for the rest of the day. That night I randomly saw a meme that said something like, "2024 is in four months. I'm still processing 2019 and now that will be five years ago." I recall a lot of people were still managing some things from 2019 when the pandemic hit, and I think for most people it's been a blur ever since. I don't know what it was, but I barely got through reading that before I burst into tears. I can't say that I'm still processing 2019, but at the same time, knowing how quickly even just these four years have gone since our pre-pandemic last hurrahs, I think it just overwhelmed me for a minute. My kids have grown up so much and life has changed (work from home, anyone?), but yet part of me is still stuck back in 2020 before the world went haywire. Of course, I then proceeded to have an absolute cry-laughing fit from a couple funny videos, so maybe I was having a mini-bipolar episode brought on by subconscious stress. Or maybe I just have a lot of cooped up emotions that had nowhere else to go. But clearly the odd passage of time these last four years has left behind a lot of unresolved emotions. So if I can't get over that, I guess the last six months shouldn't be a surprise either.
Anyway, I really consider my pictures an investment in preserving my memories, be they big ones or small ones. Admittedly, they truly are overwhelming at times--I probably take as many in two years as my parents' 40 years of photo albums--but I'm grateful for all I've done and seen and appreciate the reminders. Sometimes I have to rush through moments or there's just too many in a short period, and I have to hope the pictures fill in the blanks or let me appreciate the moment later. Life moves fast and in my brain I feel like things can get overwritten quickly, especially these days (per my previous ADHD post, but the haze of early parenthood really started that trend). Sometimes I get discouraged about life--grass is always greener, keeping up with the Joneses, all the things I haven't done--but these pictures serve as very vivid reminders of all the things I do have to be grateful for. My church growing up always projected a slide show of pictures from the past year on the church walls during the Thanksgiving service and called them "Scenes of Thanks". I definitely see my pictures like that, too. And if I'm sitting here talking about having too many memories to process, how is there even any space for the stuff I don't get to do? If that's the case, I must be doing well and am a pretty blessed girl.
So, for now I'm going to keep scrolling through them and focus on all the good stuff. So many moments, such little time. But hopefully lots more to come...
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