A mini-vacation at home

On Friday afternoon, right after lunch, I drove the kids to my mother-in-law's for the weekend. She lives in London -- two hours away -- and the kids stayed for 48 whole hours.

Now, I love being home full-time with the kids, but I've been counting down the days and the hours to this weekend all week. And by the time I picked Austin up at school at 11:30 on Friday morning, I was doing a little happy dance (much to the jealous dismay of my mom friends at school).

I've been away from the kids before but it is a very rare occurance that the kids have gone away and I have stayed home. In the summer, the kids spent four days at my parents house while Ryan and I went to Chicago. They also spent three nights at my parents house in May so that we could go to Niagara-on-the-Lake as a sort-of anniversary getaway. All of these getaways are nice, but to ship the kids off and stay home is pure luxury.

And so, I arrived in London just after 3 p.m. and was back on the road heading home just after 4 p.m. (having been delayed because Alex fell asleep in the back seat about 10 minutes from my mother-in-laws so I sat in the car in the driveway with her for awhile). At about 6:30, I was back home in my house.

And what did we do? Go out. Being able to spontaneously say, "hey, you want to go out for dinner?" was too good an offer to pass up. So we went to this great little barbecue restaurant on Bayview -- ate, drank and listened to live music for a few hours.

Saturday morning rolled around and the first thing I noticed when I woke up was that I got to wake up on my own (which sadly was around 8 a.m., but that's not the point). No one was yelling 'mommy' from down the hall. The house was quiet and it was heavenly.

We spent the next few hours Christmas shopping -- buying stuff for our kids and other kids without having to drag two kids around from store to store with us. Then it was home for a few hours where we sat and watched TV -- a show we like in the middle afternoon, not Mickey Mouse Clubhouse -- before getting ready to go to Ryan's company Holiday Party.

That was the real purpose for shipping the kids off this weekend, the holiday party. It's always a big event, with hundreds of people and free food and booze all evening. We ate, we drank, we partied, we came home to a quiet house. Heaven.

Around noon, Ryan left for London to get the kids and I've been home alone all afternoon -- another first, as I don't remember the last time I had a whole afternoon by myself in my own house. How did I spend it? Well I spent three hours cleaning -- cleaning Austin's room, cleaning Alex's room and cleaning the toys in the family room. Going through and purging all the stuff the kids don't need without them around means they're not standing over me saying "but I want that".

I did find some time to relax this afternoon, which has been nice.

And now it's almsot 6 p.m. Ryan and and the kids should be home any minute. And I'll be honest. I miss them. Saturday morning when I woke up, I didn't. But now, I do. My house has been quiet long enough -- they can come home now and make some noise. At least until the next time I really need a break.