All work and no play...

This has been a hard Summer, on both of us.  To save money we decided to forgo any vacations or trips this year, and instead decided to break up our time off into 1 and 2 days off here and there to attach to weekends and give us a long weekend and a little more relaxation throughout the summer, rather than just in 1 large 3 week chunk.  It was a great idea, but in looking back, it appears Ben and I are incapable of relaxing.  At the start of the summer we had talked about taking one of those days off and driving down to Sylvan Lake and having a lazy day by the beach, or Ben told me that he would love to take me out to his families favourite vacation area in Waskasu (sp?) for a couple days, but we have yet to do anything of the sort, and suddenly it's the end of the summer, and our Hot Beach days are a thing of the past.  Instead we've made the most of all the time we've been given, and stained our fence, sanded and painted our garage door, gutted and built back up the nursery, re-vamped the bathroom, dug out the nusence bushes in the front yard, helped Grandma move, planted vegetable gardens, weeded the flower beds, and mowed and re-mowed the grass numerous times.  I can't say that we didn't make the most of our warm days, because we really really did - but there wasn't a whole lot of "lazy days of summer" in there.

I suppose that could be chalked up to the curse of the Albertan.  When you are only blessed with about 95 warm summer days a year,  you tend to make the most of your time and try to get as much "outdoor" work done in that time as possible.  This makes for a very busy summer.  Ben said to me today "I just want our lives to slow down" I must admit, I don't know the meaning of the phrase.  We are home owners, we have three cars between the two of us, we both work full time jobs (plus I have a part time job on top of that) we have a baby on the way, and there is ALWAYS something that needs doing.  Of course next summer we won't have to paint the garage or stain the fence, or drywall the Nursery - but we are probably going to have to re-built the deck, and re-shingle the roof, and put in new windows in our basement or some other task that can only be done when the weather is warm.  This is just life.

I mentioned to Dee the other day, that I don't mind working so hard now because then I don't have to do it later and I can relax, and she said "I prefer to have an even work and play ratio" and I immediately felt a little sheepish.  We forgot to play.  My parents didn't know how to play either.  My parents were extremely hard working people, and they gave up every spare second they had to give my brother and I a great upbringing - food on the table, clothing on our backs - not an easy task when you own your own business. There were weekends where they would bring the whole family to a job site to help get a project done within the timeline needed, and Jonathan and I would help install mirrors and closet doors until the late hours of the night sometimes.  It was a way of life for us, and we didn't notice it growing up, but I did notice that when we were able to take a vacation (which didn't happen until I was 14) we would end up driving the whole time, seeing multiple places all at once and never just went one place and stayed for a while.  It took me a while to realize it, but it was because my parents didn't know how to stop and relax either.  We got so few "breaks" that we spent all our time trying to see as much as we could and then all of a sudden our time off was over, and we didn't feel any more rested than when we left in the first place.

Such a backward mentality - most of the kids I meet these days know full well how to play, but seldom have any sort of work ethic or sense of responsibility.  Ben and I have the opposite problem, we don't know how to slow down.  A couple weeks ago, Ben and his dad broke their back to dry wall the nursery, while Mom and I dug out the bushes in the front yard.  The next day I proclaimed to Ben that we weren't doing anything that day, and that it would instead be a rest day.  I wouldn't even let him cut the grass.  But instead of relaxing and spending time together we spent the day calling each other out on our attempts to sneak a little work into our day - we just don't know how to stop.  We want to, but we don't know how.  We see days off as opportunities to run errands and tie up loose ends, and it's a hard thing to re-wire years of that kind of thought process.

I suppose this whole blog entry stems from my fear of not knowing how to stop and have a little fun when we have a little one.  I've talked at great length about how great it would be to take off to the science center, or to get passes to the pool and take them on a regular basis, but I'm scared that I wont.  I don't want to be a work-aholic mother, and I don't want Ben to be over worked and over stressed either as that's no fun for anyone- but so far I'm not liking this trend that we are exhibiting right now.

I know that this summer was a special situation because we did have a reduced timeline before our little girl joins our family, but what was our excuse 2 years ago?  Or last year?  We always seem to be on the go, and I'm not entirely sure when or if we can slow down.  At this point in my "over worked rant" Ben usually brings up that his Mom would typically take this time to ask "Who makes your schedule?" which seems to be the problem - even when we're booking our own time we don't know how to schedule some "Play" in there.