A Little Break

Tomorrow, Rachel is going to my mom's house to spend the day and the night, a Grandma/Granddaughter Day. They started doing this probably a year and a half ago, a few months after my mom had moved out of her house and into her own place.  Rachel looks forward to these times, but I think I may look forward to them more!

I love that they enjoy each other's company so much that they look forward to their overnights together, but it's also nice to get a break from the drama that life with a 6-year-old girl often brings, at least our 6-year-old girl.  The last few weeks have been particularly tumultuous, so it's with a sigh of relief that I'll be sending her off for this weekend's overnight.  It's amazing how you can hit some really high highs and some really low lows all in the same two-week period.

While Rachel visits with Grandma, James, Ben and I will be going out to a brunch summit.  (Ooh, how official-sounding!)  James and I started doing this years ago but have been spotty keeping up with it, and we're trying to reestablish summits as a regular event.

What is a summit? you might be thinking.  It's just a time devoted to discussing the next few months and what they entail:  holiday plans, people we'd like to get together with, places we want to go (museums, zoos), restaurants we want to try, events that are coming up and things that we want to accomplish around the house.  It's a way to make sure we're being organized and getting to some of the things on our mental to-do lists that would otherwise just stay in our brains and never get done amidst all of the regular goings-on in our lives.

We like to start out at a restaurant with a comforting breakfast/brunch-type meal and have as much of our discussion as we can there without either rudely monopolizing a table in a busy establishment or annoying everyone because our kids have gotten restless.  Then we head home and finish what we didn't get to at the restaurant.  Sometimes it also entails physically walking through the house to think about the projects, big and small, that we may have forgotten or that come to mind as we discuss things.

We've found our summits to be really helpful with making sure we don't just keep saying "Hey, we should go to that place sometime" and never actually go there.  And getting all of those things out of our heads and onto paper helps me to declutter my mind and have fewer things going round and round, competing for attention.  If you've read the Harry Potter books or seen the movies, I suppose you could say it's kind of like my own Pensieve, but I use it for thoughts about things in the present and the future rather than memories of the past.

I'm looking forward to getting back to regular summits.  And I'm also looking forward to a yummy breakfast out!