My one month blogging break

I clicked on my blog and was surprised to see that it has been one month exactly since my last post. What a month it has been! Hopefully I will go back and fill in some of those dates with instagram photos and other photos I took and tell some of the many crazy stories of this past month. But for now let me just summarize. We moved. We moved to Southlake, TX. We bought a home. We started construction of a pool in our backyard. We unpacked. We organized. Trent started work here in Dallas. The kids started school. I hung photos on the wall. We hosted all of my family and Trent's parents in our home for Madelyn's baptism over Labor Day weekend. We kept Trent's mom with us after everyone left. We picked up his sister Melissa at the airport yesterday. And last night until nearly 2:00 in the morning Trent and I packed our bags for our trip to Beijing, China. I feel like I have climbed a mountain. A very, big, crazy, mountain. But now sitting on the plane, I can finally take a deep breath. While there is sure to be so much more going on in our lives that will feel busy, today is kind of a benchmark. All along I just kept thinking if I can make it on the airplane and have gotten everything done, I will be able to relax and enjoy this once in a lifetime kind of adventure. And I think I got almost everything done. Everything got unpacked, the kids got (sort of) settled into school, I got extra activities scheduled (flute lessons, piano lessons, swim team). I learned my way around our new town. I made maps and lists for Nana and Melissa. And finally on Friday (just 2 days ago) I looked at the list of events for our trip and realized I needed to go shopping. So while the kids were at school, Nana, Owen, and I headed to Ann Taylor and in just under 2 hours got 3 outfits (2 business casual and one formal) purchased. I even got a pretty drastic haircut (about 6 inches cut). When I taught school I had several days where I attended training and you quickly learned that getting everything set up for a substitute is 2-3 times more difficult than just doing it yourself. That is how it feels when leaving your 5 kids for a week. Getting everything ready and organized is 2-3 times more work than if you just did it. And even though I am excited to be taking this trip, I really will miss my kids. I thought several times about my mom as I was preparing to go. All through the process of her passing away I was so focused on how much I would miss her and now preparing for and taking this short week long trip has helped me to see how awful it must have been for her to plan and prepare to be gone and to know that she wasn't coming back. I can't even imagine how she did it. Even now more than a year after her death I stand back and am in awe of how gracefully she handled all that she had to endure. So Beijing -- here we come!!! and hopefully I will return to my blogging ways!