The planning, the organizing and the time away...

September has shaped up to be the busiest month in the history of our family. With a three week block of swimming lessons, preschool and ballet commencing for the year, Karter starting speech therapy,(in addition to all his other treatments)visits from out of town guests, a crazy work schedule, Kurt's hockey, my various commitments and the back and forth of selling and not selling our house, I have to say a vacation is just what we need.

I have spent the past two weeks packing and organizing for our family vacation in a week. But first, I have been blessed to be able to take a 4 day girls trip to
Phoenix with 5 other girls. We have been planning this trip for about 6 months (maybe more) and although the planning of back to back holidays may be bit crazy, sometimes you just have to go with it.

This will be the first time that I will be leaving both Kurt and the kids since Paige was born almost 4 years ago - due time? I think so! So it is off to enjoy some shopping (I have had birthday $ from May waiting for this trip) sleeping in and some time in the sun chatting about girl things without the interruption of kids. More than that, I am looking forward to some time to quite myself from all the noise of life - the phone, work, schedules, appointments, commitments etc. Time to centre myself. To bring some focus once again. I leave Wednesday and return Saturday evening.

As many of you moms know, even though time away is nice, it mean a lot of preparation for the life that will continue to play out back home. I spent the day cooking meals for Karter, doing laundry, laying out clothes for the kids, writing up schedules for mine and Kurt's mom who will be helping out while Kurt is at work and all the other planning that needs to be done for while I am away.

Because I arrive home Saturday night late, that will only give me Sunday to take care of the last minute packing and details before we leave for Seattle on Monday morning for our family vacation to Maui. With that in mind, I need to make sure that almost everything is done before I leave.

We will be in Maui for three weeks, in that time, Kurt and I will celebrate our 10th wedding anniversary. We plan to take a couple of days on our own to go away on the island to celebrate. We are really looking forward to this time away. Time to have some uninterrupted family time. To make memories that have no time constraints. With the busy month, we have had very few free moments to spend together as a full family.

The past two weeks we have been going back and forth on the decision to sell our house. I mentioned a couple of weeks ago that we did not remove the subjects on the property that we had put an offer on. For obvious reasons, we delayed putting our place on the market. In the last few weeks we have been looking at another piece of property. We may put an offer in this week and then will put our house on the market at that time. So once again, I am cleaning and organizing the house to that it is spotless for when we are gone, in case we proceed and will be showing our house while we are away.