Hey y'all -
Holy guacamole. I can't believe I haven't updated this blog since May 8th.
Here's what happened: I got a last-minute call from my boss, asking me to jump on a plane to rural Vermont (vs. super-metropolitan, gritty, urban Vermont) to help cast the series we're working on for Nat Geo. I agreed to fly out at the end of the week, and spend eight days driving around the backwoods of Vermont in a rented minivan, looking for guys who dream of having a remote cabin and then convincing them that they wanted to take time off from their dairy farms or logging businesses to appear on reality television. This is not at all the strangest thing I've ever done in the name of work.
My first impulse was to say no. Eight days is forever when it comes to being separated from your children. But the more I thought about it, the more the idea started to appeal to me. With everything that had been going on in our lives (selling a house, buying a house, moving twice), I was running on empty and running short on patience. I've never spanked either one of you, but in the days leading up to my trip, it had started to seem more and more tempting. When you decide to become a mother, you inevitably have to give up (to some degree) the life you had before. I found myself missing my old, all-consuming job; it's weird, but I'm good at it.
So I told my boss to book the flight.
I figured Hagen would be fine hanging out with Dad for a week; he's pretty easygoing and as long as he's being held, he doesn't often care who's doing the holding. I thought Laney would be a different story. She speaks girl and Dad speaks boy, and sometimes watching them try to communicate is like watching a train wreck in slow motion. The morning of my flight, I put this together:
It was a collection of bubbles and kazoos and M&Ms, and it worked like a charm according to Thor, until Day 2, when she figured out she just had to be good until she got the present.
Vermont was beautiful, by the way. I met a lot of cows and learned far more than I ever wanted to know about the dairy business. The trees were blooming and the cows were all calving.
I met a lot of interesting, fun people, and learned I could get on the good side of even the most curmudgeonly old coot by starting a sentence with, "The government, man, I tell you..." I met a man named Peezer who let me pet his stuffed muskrat. I was followed through a field by a day-old calf. I was driven up the side of a slick mountain in an ATV by a "woo-hoo"ing former race car driver as I clutched the handlebar and thought about all those times I should have called my mama. I drank a beer with the Elks club. I met a guy who keeps 50 million bees.
Life is good out there.
Love,
Mom
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