What a month June is! In theory, I love June, but every year it swamps me with way too many things to do! No wonder it takes us Michiganders a while to feel like it’s summer! We run around for a month while our state gets warm! I haven’t had the time or the specific topic to blog about in two whole weeks!

This month we had a getaway. Well, we call them stolen moments around here. When you find yourself spending time with someone you love quite unexpectedly, it’s a stolen moment.
Getaways with my husband are not something I’ve ever been good at doing for a couple reasons. First, I don’t leave my children very well. I’ve never let Christian take me far away because I just feel like they are my God-given responsibility for at least 18 years, and I take that very seriously. It all sounds so noble but no worries. I have BIG plans for when Kyrsten hits the eighteen year mark. But, for now, most of our stolen moments are at places like Biggby.

We will be still so very young when all three are grown, and the first order of business is sky-diving. Christian and I made a promise to each other to jump out of plane together to celebrate the beginning of time for the two of us. Then, we will board a plane to Australia, a place I’ve dreamed of visiting since I was a little girl. He has kindly held off on visiting this particular location in all his years of jetting around the globe for work to wait for my turn. Isn’t that sweet?
From there, well, we shall see, but let’s just say our plans involve much less of a mailing address and lots and lots of grandbabies.

To celebrate our twenty years together, Frankfort, Michigan was the destination of choice, and let me tell you, it was PERFECT!!!! My husband, who, bless his heart, is not usually the planner in the family, got me to commit a whole weekend away and then whisked me off to locations north, and treated me like a princess for a whole weekend. We ate the yummiest food, and had a room with our very own white bathrobes and hot tub. We walked the beaches and shops, we played card games at roadside stop picnic tables with breathtaking views, and it was nothing short of idyllic.

I remembered something that is easy to forget after years and years of family life. Taking the time to look into the eyes of not just the father of my children, but the man I fell in love with, puts things back in order. It is so very easy to let day-to-day living crowd out the beauty that is right in front of us!

When Addie was a little, tiny three year old she had her first of three surgeries. This one was an emergency appendectomy and just about broke her momma’s heart. She was in pain way too long due to the busyness of the surgeon and her appendix had just begun to rupture by the time I had to hand my precious girl into the arms of a masked surgical team. Not my best moment. She came through the surgery just fine and proceeded to get very spoiled by friends and family with about 75,453 stuffed animals. But, as we stayed in the hospital with our little punkin, I watched her sad little hurting face and just wished for a normal day. That’s all. Just the kind where you do all the mundane chores and everyone is normal and healthy. Funny how you don’t appreciate good health until you feel bad, right?

Similarly, I vowed to never again complain about doing laundry after all of my laundry challenges from the first 12 years or so of marriage. For the first year, while pregnant, I hauled all of my laundry from our upstairs apartment down to my little Mustang and over to my parents to spend the day doing laundry, or sometimes, the laundromat because it got done quicker. Then we moved to a little, tiny house where the dryer in the basement shocked the living daylights out of us anytime we touched any of its metal parts. Including the door handle! We used a wooden spoon to operate that one. Then we went to our next house where the basement felt to me like a dungeon and with three little ones I ran up and down those stairs sooo many times a day that I promised I would never, ever complain about laundry again if I could have it on the main floor. Here I am. And I don’t complain.
I also never complain about emptying the dishwasher after years of hand-washing every single dish my precious family dirtied.

I listen to folks complain about Michigan’s “high heat” and humidity on a 85 degree day when we have several family members enduring an 108 degree heat index in Mississippi. I’m not complaining!

One of our favorite things to do is show someone who has never seen Lake Michigan before our lake. Last week, Christian had a business associate in town who is moving here from Canada and needed a tour of the area with his lovely family. I had been telling his wife through email about our area, especially our lake, but I don’t think I could have prepared them for the view. As we showed them neighborhoods, our travels took them around several of our lovely inland lakes. As we passed Muskegon Lake, they thought they were seeing our “Big Lake.” We chuckled as we were about to round the bend and show them the real thing. We rounded a corner, and they got out of their car and their eyes grew huge as they took in our “ocean.” Shoes and socks were quickly removed as they ran out to check out our sand and water. Forty-eight states later, there really is nothing like it.

So, crazy as June may be, have you noticed how stunningly gorgeous the leaves and flowers are? Have you noticed that your feet aren’t freezing (and you don’t even have fuzzy socks on)? Have you been enjoying the sparkle of the fireflies? Have you eaten a s’more around a campfire yet? Or been swimming, or just walked the beaches of our one-of-a-kind lake? We still have two months of absolute perfection left here in Michigan. I hope we are not complaining about the rain or the heat or the busyness of a day.

We have so very much to be grateful for.