Vacation | Marriage Confessions Vacation | Laugh. Fight. Stay Married.

This post is more of a scheduling pep talk for myself than anything else. In the next week, there are so many major events happening that I can hardly keep myself straight. I get tired whenever I think about it, and then I just want to take a nap until April. But I can’t because I have too much to do. So, I thought I’d make peace with the next couple days by blogging about it to help calm my nerves. Plus, if I’m blogging then I don’t have to deal with the other things. It’s a win-win!

1. On Tuesday I have my formal evaluation at school, which means my principal and vice principal will be in my classroom for an entire period evaluation my teaching. I’ve got a great lesson planned and I feel good about it, but the lesson requires a lot of prep work (including a sample of an art project that I have to make – oy!). And besides the prep work, it’s just very nerve-wracking to know you’re being observed, no matter how prepared you are. I have my pre-conference with my principal and vice principal tomorrow, so cross your fingers that that goes well.

2. On Saturday, my agent is coming to town from New York. She’s here as a guest lecturer at the University of Florida for a couple of days, and so I am going up to meet her for drinks on Saturday. It’ll be nice to see her, but the real reason for the visit is so that I can hand deliver her my final draft of my book proposal. I haven’t blogged about my book in over a year, and, to be honest, I doubt I’ll be blogging about it very much in the next few months. But know that I am working so very, very hard on it. I don’t think I’ve ever worked this hard on anything professionally in my whole life. I am in the third year of the process and am, hopefully, in the homestretch now. In the next few months, my agent will be sending my book proposal out to publishers to see if we can get a book deal. I try not to think about how much I want that, so that I don’t get disappointed if it doesn’t happen. But I really want this. I’ll be light on the blogging this week as I finish my draft up in the evenings, so bear with me and think happy thoughts for me while I’m gone.

3. GRACIE TURNS ONE NEXT SUNDAY! I can’t believe it is finally here! Gracie Girl is turning the big O-N-E next weekend, and we’re having a small family get-together to celebrate. My mom came down this weekend and we went shopping for decorations and menu items, so I feel much more prepared for her party than I did last week, but there’s still so much to do! I have Friday off of school, so I’m hoping to finish up her party plans then. We’re having her party on Sunday afternoon, which should be fun for me because my book proposal will be done and delivered, so I will definitely feel like celebrating. Sometime before now and then, I have to get her birthday video together, too. I made one for each of Bean’s birthdays so far and I’ve already started compiling Gracie’s. I’ll post it on the blog on Friday. I can’t wait for you all to see it!

4. Chris and I leave for Costa Rica the Monday after Gracie’s birthday. We are both looking forward to some time away, but neither of us have had a chance to really get anything ready. I’m hoping Sunday night after the party we’ll be able to pack…which is about 9 hours before our flight. Nothing like a little last minute suitcase stuffing! I’m hoping to be able to blog from Costa Rica, so definitely check in next week for blog posts about what we’re up to. I know there will be zip lining, surfing, and hanging bridges on the menu. (What, pray tell, does one wear while crossing a hanging bridge over a ravine in the rainforest????) I’ll be posting to Twitter and Instagram (my user name is MarriageConfessions) all week from my phone, so be sure you’re following along! Costa Rica is going to be so wonderful for us! Our travel coordinator sent us our itinerary and we were just blown away! It will truly be a Gift of Happiness. On that note, I have been contacted by two different blog readers in the past month or so who said they also won a trip! How exciting! And what a fun thing for the country of Costa Rica to be doing!

5. While Chris and I are both so excited about our vacation, we are both a little anxious about leaving the wee ones for so long. Chris’s mom will be keeping them half of the week and my parents will have them the last part. We’re trying to keep it as routine as possible for the kids, so they’ll be in daycare all week. Hopefully, that will help them adjust to us not being there a little easier. I’m actually alright about being gone. I know I’ll miss them, but I’m really looking forward to some alone time with Chris. This will be like a second honeymoon for us! And it’s free! But Chris is a different story. Two or three times he has said to me out of the blue, “Maybe we should just stay home…” or “This isn’t a great time for us to be away. Maybe we should cancel.” Each time I told him if he wanted to stay home, that’d be fine but Sarah and I would be going instead. (How’s that for sympathetic?) The closer we get to leaving, though, the more I think about not being with the kids. I know they’ll be fine, but we’re just going to miss the little goobers!

So, there you have it. The next week for us is going to be chaotic, but so exciting! It’s been a long time since we had so many GOOD things happen to us at once!!! I’m trying to enjoy them all one at a time and to appreciate how important each adventure really is, but sitting here on Sunday afternoon looking at the week laid out before me, all I can think is, “How will we ever make it to April?!?!”

30 comments | posted in Book, Jobs and Careers, Marriage Confessions, Out and About, travel, Vacation | tags: book publishing, Costa Rica, life, travel, writing

I get asked a lot about the trip to Costa Rica that Chris and I are taking at the end of March. We were recipients of the “Gift of Happiness,” which is an eight-day stay in Costa Rica at beautiful hotels, doing adventurous activities, in exotic locations. Sounds pretty darn happy to me.

But whenever people would ask me about it, I sort of avoided the topic. There were two reasons. First, there was this tiiiiiiiny little problem with my passport. Like, the fact that I didn’t have one. Years ago, when I was in my teens, I had a passport, but who the heck knows where it is now. When I needed one for my honeymoon, it was during the time when you could still use a certified birth certificate to fly with, so that’s how I got out of the country then. But now, I needed a real passport and mine was no where to be found. I decided not to tell our lovely travel agent this minor detail in the planning (sorry, if you’re reading right now!!!). I figured I’d apply for a new passport, on the hunch that since I now needed an adult passport, it technically WAS the first time I was applying. But as the plans were formed for our trip and as plane tickets and hotel reservations arrived, I kept this horrible pit in my stomach. What if they sent the passport application back to me and said it would be a more complicated process since I had lost my first? I wouldn’t have time for that before our trip! I was up all night long some nights, worrying about my passport.

But then… IT CAME!!!!!!

I was so excited I could hardly speak! Now I was legal and ready to roll! But even with that huge weight off my chest, I still found it hard to get really excited. And, actually, I feel that way about a lot of things these days.

In the past few years, I’ve become a lot more hesitant about celebrating things too far into the future. We made a lot of plans for the past two years – a move across country, a new life for our family, great jobs, and an easy transition. And a lot of stuff disappointed me and, at time, downright hurt me, when I expected one thing and another thing happened instead. I guess that happens to you as you get older. In fact, it probably happens to people a lot younger than me, but I just hadn’t experienced it yet. For the most part, whatever I wanted to happen in my life, had happened. I’d worked really hard to accomplish goals and follow my plans, and so I just got used to things always working out for me. So, when I went through those few years where everything sucked, it was a really big wake up call for me that sometimes in life, things just don’t go like you want them to. I’m glad I learned that lesson, but learning it did cause me to shy away a bit from celebrating things a bit too early.

The downside to that hard life lesson is that you can sometimes lose your optimism. I remember when we finally found our house and were under contract to buy, everyone around me was so excited and wanted me to be excited, too. But I had just come off the heels of a two year period where everything seemed to fall apart at the last minute, and I wasn’t too eager to get all excited. I basically waited for the other shoe to drop through the whole buying process. And that’s pretty normal, I guess. Buying a house is tense and stressful. But even after we got into the house, I never really had a big celebration moment. It was always just a “I’m going to get by until something bad happens,” kind of feeling. I think that’s why I’ve been so slow on the renovations to our house. I haven’t really sat around dreaming of paint samples and fabric swatches or anything. And I think that’s all because I’ve lost a bit of my excitement about major events in life because I got burned so bad during that two year period of time.

I worried for a while that it was depression that kept me from being excited about things. Whenever something major would happen and I wouldn’t be as excited as I used to get, I’d secretly stop and wonder if life was always going to be this way. Would I always expect bad things to happen now? Would I ever be completely, totally happy again? And if I wasn’t, would it be because I’d grown wiser with age, or would it be because I had pieces of depression still in my mind, planted like tiny emotional landmines that always went off whenever happy things happened to me? But I’ve been thinking a lot about that lately, and I don’t think it is remnants of depression. I think that as we get older, we learn the hard lesson that life sometimes doesn’t go as planned. The upside to all of that is that I’m also learning that it’s often in the unplanned situations that you find real happiness. Deeper happiness.

And so, I think it’s strangely (and divinely, I must say) ironic that Chris and I are getting ready for our “Gift of Happiness” trip. Because if I’ve learned anything about happiness, it’s that it really is a gift that is given out of experiences and moments created by us, for us, and with us by the people we really love in our lives.

We leave in three weeks, and for the first time since we heard we were going, I got excited this morning. Really, truly excited. Giddy even. I was riding in my car on the way to work and a song came on the radio. It was about a couple packing their bags and getting away from it all for a while. And I thought about sitting on the beach with Chris, laughing with him, spending entire days with him without having to share our attention between kids or dogs or jobs or family. An entire week of having plans, but also of having the luxury of knowing that the absolute worst that could happen is our plans would fall through and we’d end up sitting on a beach all day. And I thought to myself, “You know, who couldn’t use a little gift of happiness every now and then?”

11 comments | posted in Depression, Husbands, Marriage Confessions, Operation BWYP, travel, Understanding Katie, Vacation | tags: Costa Rica, depression, Gift of Happiness, happiness

This past weekend we went to Atlanta to have Christmas with my side of the family at my sister’s house. My sister and John Michael have the cutest little condo in downtown Atlanta. It is just what you would picture for a successful, young couple to have. And Ginny has decorated it perfectly. When we got there, it was beautiful in its Christmas glory, with their huge Christmas tree front and center.

Twenty minutes into our visit and we had destroyed their house.

I blame my mom and dad. They went above and beyond for all of our Christmas presents this year (like every year!). It was really incredible! My favorite gift, though, was a Kindle! They gave one to me, my sister, and my Grandma. We all love to read and so that was the perfect present. Although, they also got me a label maker for my classroom, which I will geek out on as soon as I get back to school. I’ve already labeled everything my kids own in the 24 hours that we’ve been home.

Gracie got her first baby doll, too…

…which she promptly ate.

And Bean got an awesome Thomas the Train set. Thomas chugs around the track and there’s even a crane that lifts boxes onto the freight part of the train. Bean quickly figured out that the freight thingy could also carry Lightning McQueen and, suddenly, it was like two cartoon worlds collided. Bean was mesmerized.

We spent Saturday afternoon opening presents and spending time together. It was really nice and I actually enjoyed it almost more than Christmas morning itself because we stopped to chat or eat between rounds of opening presents. It just seemed a lot less frantic than Christmas mornings can be and it was nice to be able to pause and enjoy each other even more than the presents.

Although, some of the presents were pretty awesome…

On Sunday morning, we laid around and had a slow-moving morning, with breakfast on the couch in our jammies. Bean must have been in the Christmas spirit because he shared his bagel with Gracie. And Bean doesn’t share food, like, at ALL. It was a Christmas miracle.

Later that morning, my Grandma came over (she’s been staying at my Aunt and Uncle’s house in Atlanta this week) and we opened presents with her, too.

Later, we all got dressed and went to the late church service at my sister’s church. I figure, I have about a year where I can dress Gracie in things like this before she starts protesting. I plan to take full advantage.

After church, the guys went to play golf with some of my dad’s old golfing buddies from when we used to live in Atlanta and my mom, sister, and I took the kids to two of the most Atlanta places you can go…

The Varsity is an Atlanta icon. They serve hot dogs and hamburgers, french fries and onion rings, Coke-a-Cola (of course) and their famous Frosted Orange, which are like orange frosties. Delicious! And we partook of it all! Even Gracie ate French fries!

After The Varsity, we headed to Lenox Mall to ride The Pink Pig.

Now, if you aren’t from Atlanta or even the South, this is going to sound very strange. The Pink Pig has been around since the late 1950s. It began as a little train ride at Christmas that went through Rich’s department store (back when Rich’s was still around). It hung from the ceiling and went through a pink winter wonderland inside the store and then it went outside to the roof top and you rode through an outdoor winter wonderland. My mom used to take me and my sister every year.

This is the original Pink Pig train that I rode when I was little.

Now, they have that on display and they’ve upgraded (or downgraded, if you ask me) to little trolley-like trams that take you through a tent in the Lenox Mall parking lot that is set up like a pink Christmas village. We waited in line for 45 minutes to ride a 2 minute train, but it was totally worth it. And I’m so glad it was my mom who got to take the kids for their first time because she’s the one who used to take me.

Later Sunday night, we met up with the guys at my Aunt Joan and Uncle Tim’s house to see them and my two cousins. My cousin, Abby, graduated this weekend from the University of Georgia (which I will forgive her for) and my cousin, Jake, is in his sophomore year at West Point. They definitely got all the brains in our family.

We don’t get to see my aunt and uncle very often, so it’s always nice to spend some time with them. Their house is beautiful and my Aunt Joan is one of the best hostesses. You can call her about an hour before you show up on her doorstep and she’ll still have a huge spread out for you to eat. I don’t know how she does it.

My Grandma is staying with them through Christmas and so she was there while we opened presents with Joan and Tim’s family. It was a lot of fun and I can’t wait to show pictures of this beautiful butterfly mobile they got Gracie. Bean got, among other things, this stretchy, slimy frog, which he keeps trying to feed his sister.

I actually have a pretty small family, but you’d never know it. I know I never knew it when I was growing up because the small little family that I do have is filled with the love and kindness of hundreds of family members. I think family is the same as Christmas. It doesn’t matter what day you celebrate or what kind of family you have to celebrate with, it is what you make it. And this weekend we made it pretty darn awesome.

24 comments | posted in Childhood, Family, Fun Things, holidays, Marriage Confessions, Operation BWYP, Vacation | tags: Atlanta, Christmas, Family, Macy's Pink Pig, The Varsity

Okay, friends. We are continuing our tour through the five trip packages Chris and I have been offered as a winner of the Costa Rica Million Dollar Gift of Happiness giveaway. Don’t forget as you read that we weren’t selected because we are special. We won just like you can win, so head over to their Facebook fan page, enter to win like I did, and then cross your fingers, eyes, and toes.

Package #3: Adventure Package (Guanacaste, La Fortuna, Quepos & Central Valley)

Ya’ll. I’m not trying to persuade you, but this package looks like the PERFECT blend of relaxation and activities. Not to mention that every hotel is amazing! Now, I’ll go wherever you vote to send us, but this one might be at the top of my list.

The first day, we are taken by private driver (someone asked if we have a driver on every package option and the answer is yes, and that same driver will be with us the entire trip, AND he or she will be a translator for us when necessary) to our first hotel, the Hotel Capitan Suizo. Hubba hubba.

We’re at Hotel Capitan for two nights and while we’re there we are able to explore the Tamarindo-Playa Grande area, which is situated on the Pacific coast of Costa Rica, or relax at the hotel in the pools, on the beach, or treat ourselves to spa treatments at the resort.

On our third day, we jump on a plane to our next destination in the northern plains of Costa Rica, La Fortuna de San Carlos. This area is rich in cattle, pineapples, oranges, ornamental plants and other products that Costa Rica exports. One of the most famous attractions in this area is the Arenal Volcano, one of the ten most active volcanoes in the world! We arrive at Arenal Kioro Hotel and spend the rest of the day exploring the beautiful resort at the base of the volcano.

Each room at the resort has a glass-front view of the volcano and a jacuzzi. Wowza! On our second day at the Arenal Kioro, we would head out to the Arenal Hanging Bridges. Now – true. I am scared of heights. But when I looked at the website, it doesn’t seem like I’d be hanging freely over caverns. It’s more like just another way to view the rainforest. I think it sounds awesome!

On the fifth day, we head by private car or plane to our third hotel, the Arenal del Mar Beachfront and Rainforest Resort. The resort is in the Central Pacific area of Costa Rica, adjacent to the Manuel Antonio National Park.

While at this hotel, we spend two days with the options of relaxing on the resort grounds in their pools, jacuzzis, or getting spa treatments, or we could take a guided tour through the rainforest which lines the Pacific Coast, taking us through both the rainforest and the beach.

On the seventh day, we travel to the Finca Rosa Bianca Coffee Plantation and Inn. This hotel is beautiful and we have the option of spending our last two days relaxing and enjoying the beautiful bed and breakfast or touring the coffee plantation.

The next day, we jump on a plane home. And I’ll start to cry and wonder why I don’t have a driver, jacuzzi, and drink with an umbrella to meet me at the Orlando airport.

Package #4: Romance Package (Tropical Rainforest in the North, La Fortuna & Guanacaste)

If you’re into relaxing (I am), yoga (I used to be), or relaxing (I am), then this is the package for you. Or me. We spend the first two nights at the El Silencio Lodge and Spa, which is an eco-luxury hotel that focuses on well-being, peace, and silence. Ahhhhhhh…. Not a bad change from a house full of loud kids and smelly dogs. We spend those two days enjoying spa treatments, yoga sessions, and relaxation.

On our third day, we head to La Fortuna de San Carlos, where we can explore the Arenal Volcano. We’ll spend the next two nights at the Arenal Springs Resort and Spa which has 26 colonial style deluxe cabins with breathtaking views of the volcano. The resort also has private horse stables for hiking or horseback riding through trails near the volcano. On our second day at Arenal Springs, we head down to the village of Maleku where a local guide will explain how the Maleku tribe have lived throughout the years. Later, the tribe will actually perform a ceremony called “God-Nature-Man.”

On the fifth day, we will be “privately transferred” (oooohhh la la) to Nosara beach in Guanacaste. Here, we will stay at The Harmony Hotel, where we can do activities such as yoga, meditation, or surfing for the next three days. On the eighth day, we head home.

I feel more balanced and rested already!

Package #5: Wildlife Package (San Ramon, Quepos and Drake)

Our first day on this vacation would put us in the Los Angeles Cloud Forest, which sounds like a pretty spectacular place to be. We’ll spend the first two nights at the Villa Blanca Cloud Forest Hotel, which is a property with over 2,000 acres of the Los Angeles Biological Reserve and INBio Research Station. While here, we have the opportunity to take bird watching tours, horseback tours through the rainforest, or tours through the Thermal Hot Springs.

On the third day, we head to the Manuel Antonio National Park where we will stay overnight at the Si Como No Resort Spa and Wildlife Refuge. This resort has a “pure vida” vibe that boasts a private wildlife refuge, butterfly aquarium, crocodile lagoon, and amphibian garden. To put me in touch with the creatures and creepy crawlers of the Costa Rican wildlife!!

On the fourth day, we could either choose to work the organic vegetable plantation or in the rescue program for wild animals. Or, if we wanted, we could just hang out at the resort and relax for the day. Which I should probably do since I tend to kill any plants I touch.

On the fifth day, we head to the Pacific lowland rainforest, National Park of Corcovado. Here, we will stay at the Casa Corcovado Jungle Lodge, a 170 acre private reserve bordering Corcovado National Park.

We spend the rest of our trip here, where we could choose to spend a day at Cano Island. Here we can picnic on the beaches, snorkel on the coral reefs, or hike up to burial grounds. Once back to the resort, we can spend our day on bird watching tour with a naturalist guide or just relaxing at the lodge. On the eighth day, we fly home.

******

Well, that’s it. All five packages. I’m excited and relaxed and pumped and dumbfounded all at one time. And in a mindset like that, I just cannot decide on a trip. So, that’s where you all come in. Vote below on which trip you think Chris and I should take. We’re so excited to see where you all send us!!! VOTE NOW! (P.S. The poll looks weird, but it works!)