Perspective

We're all settled in at Brandon's parents' house.  Everyone just had ice cream together downstairs and now I hear Brandon telling some story down the hall while Brent and Will are laughing.

We need to get in bed for our 7:45am flight tomorrow morning out of LAX - we're going to Utah again.  Hopefully we'll snag a house this time.  That's the idea anyway, and we only have 24 hours to do it.

I've chilled a bit since my last melodramatic post.  I didn't shed a single tear today at the house when Brandon, Dina and I cleaned together for about four hours.  (I did, however, shed tears with Dina in front of the house after we were done.  I think I almost have her convinced to move to Utah.)

A couple of nights ago when we first "moved in", I was in the guest bathroom putting my hair up to wash my face when I remembered a day a little over fifteen years ago when I was putting my hair up in that same mirror before putting on my wedding veil.  It was a funny feeling thinking back to that day and all the unknowns of our future.  We were just undergrads for crying out loud!

As I washed my face, I thought about what the me of fifteen years ago would have thought if she could have seen us now, Brandon in the other room watching a training video for his first ever robotic prostatectomy the next morning (how'd you like to be that guy - luckily it went really well, the proctor said it was the best "first" he'd ever seen), our four healthy, beautiful children sleeping soundly in the other room together, me acting like a big baby as we prepare to move back to the place where we were living as college students way back then.

It helped me see things a little more MACRO, and not get so lost in the MICRO.  It helped me look back and see how we've been guided all along the way on our little path, and even though it's a fact that as we get older more and more doors close, the doors we're going through are pretty darn good.

P.S.  I think another reason I felt more happy than sad today, was because it was the last time I would wipe down the obnoxious tiles on the kitchen counters, the last time I would use the ancient, dysfunctional toilet, and the last time I would smell the funny smells in the old cupboards.  (It's been sort of a "lipstick on a pig" kind of house.)