I Want A Richer Life

Yes, I know it's the 28th, not quite resolution time yet.  And I'm not into resolutions much anyway, especially other people's fitness resolutions that make it hard for me to get an elliptical at the gym come January.  But I was just reading the blog of a friend of mine, and some of her posts and pictures really struck me: she is better at living life than I am, at trying new things and finding new experiences for her kids and traveling with her family and generally not being in a rut.  I hereby resolve to spend 2013 trying to be more like her.

In fairness, she has some advantages over me, or at least some differences in lifestyle, that help her: she homeschools her two kids (ages 8 and 14), both she and her husband work from home, and she is a travel blogger, to name a few.  It's much easier to pick up and go places under those circumstances.  The good Lord knows that I should not be a homeschooling mother--I don't have the patience or the temperament for it--so I am grateful for the proximity and quality of our local schools.  A lot of her activities come through her homeschool co-op.  And my husband leaves the house at 5AM for the office and returns about 7PM five days a week, so his flexibility is limited.  I get all this.  I also get that our after-school hours and weekends are full of activities, virtually all things that the kids have chosen for themselves.

BUT.  They don't understand what they are missing, and as parents, we could still do better than we're doing.  For two people who were both already seasoned international travelers as small children themselves, we've done a lousy job of broadening their horizons so far.

Once or twice a year we could pack up and take a weekend away, even within driving range.  We could finally throw the kids on a plane and head to the West Coast to visit the family out there.  For years the thought paralyzed me because Thing Two was so difficult, but now he's past that and the holdup is entirely in my head, although it pains me to admit it.  Even if we didn't leave the area, we could make more of a point of seeking out activities...corn mazes and apple picking and shows and hiking and historical stuff, just to name a couple of things off the top of my head.  We don't need to be in the same routine of school and activities essentially year-round.  Even if we just started small with summer and built a week or two of family adventure in with the summer camps and soccer when making our plans, that would be a good start.

You see, I'm afraid that we will keep on with our routine usualness and one day look up and find that the kids are gone, that we lost that special time with them because we were focused on the day-to-day and didn't see the big picture, the life-as-an-adventure-to-be-experienced aspect of it all.  I want their lives to already be bigger than this tiny, homogeneous corner of the world before they leave it for wherever they will end up as adults.

Hence my resolution.  This kind of richness cannot be measured in money, only in quality of life and breadth of life experiences, and by that standard I hope to be much richer by this time next year.