That's just us

I was exceptionally whiny this week and I know it was irritating to those blessed people who get to live with me. It was one of my favorite weeks of the year - the week leading up to the Georgia vs Auburn football game. I know this seems extreme and maybe a little exaggerated but I'm telling no lies. I LOVE this rivalry. Or love-hate this rivalry but I love the energy that swarms around the game every year. I can remember travelling down 85 many times, once in my friends conversion van singing 90's rap songs with her older brothers. Another time I just remember never being so cold in my entire life but the Bulldawgs won so nothing mattered. Years ago when I was free as a bird and just freshly making commission checks we put on what I still think was the grandest tailgate before the game that ever existed. The next year Georgia banned this kind of tailgating from North Campus and I like to think it was because of our 4 foot tall speakers and gobs of people all smashed under two tents. Ahhhh the days! Not so high on the memory charts was mine and Brad's first football game after we came home from our honeymoon. Let's just say we ended up at a restaurant talking over this whole marriage and expectation thing. Nonetheless, it was a memory and it adds to the intense feeling I have over this fun week. When you live in Atlanta almost everyone either went to Georgia or couldn't get in and went to Auburn. The schools are oddly similar though both will claim that their respective towns are that much more charming, inviting, and picturesque than the other.
So this week I was just in a sour mood. I can say for the first time in my 2.5 years of being a full time mom that I wanted to be fired. The boys didn't love the whole time change thing and though they still slept just fine, they, too, were just in stinky moods every morning. This didn't help my already growing desire to be fired for atleast the weekend. There is this one thing as a mom that I think is what makes the whole gig as hard as it is and it is that there are no weekends, no vacations, and no Veterans days off. A Tuesday morning looks like a Saturday morning and while many of them are fun and entertaining and do not involve a tie and a morning meeting - they are all the same. I hope you don't hear me complaining....just stating the truths. And occasionally this reality makes me a little whiny. I just want one morning to feel like a "day off." I don't even want to sleep later - just wake up and eat my eggs the way I used to and watch the today show and drink my coffee slowly.
This week the modern conveniences of social media just made me even more sour. As gameday approached I watched everyone announce how they would be spending their tailgating hours in my favorite city and I think I considered at one point just checking them into Children's for a day for an unexplainable cold and coming back the next day to get them. I know, that's bad. I unabashedly begged my husband to find a way, any way, to get us to Athens for the weekend because my soul just needed it. I needed to sit in a folding chair under a magnolia tree with warm clothes on and eat chicken fingers and potato chips for hours on end with no thought of a diaper or a green nose. But come Saturday morning the crowds were travelling north on 85 and we were watching Cat in the Hat and cleaning up syrup.....just like any other Saturday morning. But this is why I like my marriage partner. At 945 I mentioned the not-so-blissful idea of packing up the kiddos and heading to Athens. Yes, we had no tickets in hand, our boys both had nasty green noses, I only logged a few hours of sleep the night before, it was freeeeeezing that morning and, conveniently, Brad had taken a few Tylenol- PM's at 8am that morning. But after some quick showers to ponder this idea and packing up anything that could be needed in a crisis with two toddlers amid a sea of drunken tailgaters - we were on the road.
I offered to drive since I was dealing with a walking zombie for atleast the next 6 hours while the "PM" effects wore off. !0 minutes into the trip and all of the males in the car were snoozing and I was as happy as I had expected I would be driving the back roads to my favorite place on earth. About 20 minutes out my patient woke up. I said, "Brad, we are either going to be singing from the rooftops that we loaded our toddlers up on a whim and headed to one of the biggest party scenes we could imagine on a cold fall day OR we would hate ourselves the whole way home and wonder as we do many times why we didn't just make our lives more easy and stay home?" And Brad said, perfectly, "That's just who we are, Betsy. We say we should make our lives easier and cut out all of the travel and babysitters and obscure commitments but that's not us." And that is what I love about us. While life with kids has certainly changed every aspect of our lives, even down to when I can eat my eggs and if we ever shower, it hasn't fully taken the wind out of our sail. I love just "rolling with it" and enjoying life with kids in tow.
Obviously that last sentence answered my question. The afternoon went perfectly and I was in heaven. I loved watching the game-goers and feeling young again. I loved being with my family and running into so many old friends and I loved watching the boys throw a football on North Campus and shout "Go Dawgs" to people passing by. Life now isn't about wishing it was the way it was years ago but embracing it with a a diaper bag in tow. I will say both Brad and I walked through the piles of grills and radios and bourbon bottles on north campus saying "I never ever thought I'd be pushing a double stroller through campus!" And that is why I love us!
The boys tacking eachother at the tailgate.

Ringing the game day bell with Nise and Big.

If mama is happy, everybody is happy!