Freedom trail

I have a confession to make: for the last two weeks, George has been in a summer camp sponsored by his preschool.  And Frances has been finishing her last two weeks of Kindergarten.  What does this mean?  For the last two weeks I have had approximately 2.5 hours per day to myself; by far the most amount of alone time since stopping my law practice.

In typical motherly fashion, I’ve spent most of it running errands (grocery, Target, Sams, fabric store, back to Target—can’t escape the pull of that red bullseye), cleaning, or tackling those house projects that are either loud (and thus not doable during nap time) or located in the kids’ rooms.  But as this second and final week of freedom is winding up, I decided to get crazy this morning:

I took a walk.  Please notice there is not a soul around, and if you could hear what I heard when I took this picture it would only be my footsteps, the wind in the trees, and the happy mockingbird that seemed to follow me for the entire duration.

I felt a little guilty enjoying the late morning fresh air when Will has been slaving away at the office for 20 hours a day—so I promptly took a picture, emailed it to him (“wish you were here!”) and went about my walk.  Guilty conscious gone.  Okay, not really; but I do have enough sense to know that while Will’s workload has reached the “inhumane” level, he doesn’t expect that I do the same on my end. 

The funny thing is my entire walk took only about 20 minutes.  These trails are located in a park very close to our house and I’ve walked them many times with the kids and it always takes at least 45 minutes to walk about half of them.  With Frances and George in tow, it’s less of a peaceful cardio session and more of a stick-collecting, mud-stomping, leaf-crunching adventure.  And I wouldn’t trade those walks for anything in the entire world.  But I also loved (and needed) my faster paced walk.  Twenty minutes later, I felt like a new woman.

I guess Frances and George aren’t the only ones learning something new during these two weeks.

Happy Wednesday, everyone!