Can you ever go home again?

Well I am back from my week long vacation with the girls in California. I don't know if you can call it a real vacation when you are all by yourself with your three kids and you have to drive twelve hours there and back with a 1 year old but we did manage to have lots of fun. I finally got caught up on everyones blogs which by the way took me like over an hour! Everybody blogged so much while I was gone I loved it! My camera is dead right now and to be completely honest I really don't want to dig it out of the mess we like to call Daddy's car at the moment. We got in last night and I haven't wanted to open the trunk yet. I am sure it smells delicious from all the dirty clothes that are in there. When I do finally get around to cleaning up I will post our cute pictures with our cousins and aunts and Grandma.

My sister was nice enough to let us come and visit for a whole week even though it meant seven little kids under the age of nine in one house! It wasn't the easiest especially for the hosts, as it never is when it is your house getting demolished. We definately added to the disgustingness when my whole family got sick the day after we got there, including me, and Dustin who was dealing with it at home all week. Josey had been complaining of her stomach for a couple of days before we left but I didn't think a wole lot of it. Well once we got there Lilly and I got SICK! I would say we got Montezuma's Revenge if we had been in Mexico but since we weren't I don't know who's revenge we got but they were ANGRY with us. It was NOT fun I will say that. As I am dealing with that, Maddy decides to get sick in the middle of the night and ends up puking all over her cousins room at 4:00 in the morning. I didn't think there was anything worse than cleaning up somebody elses puke but let me tell you it is actually worse when you are cleaining up some one elses puke, at some one elses house, at wee hours in the morning and you don't know where any cleaning supplies are or where all the light switches are and you are sick yourself. It was disgusting. It wasn't until we were almost headed home that we were all finally feeling better. I am just hoping that her girls don't come down with it because they are supposed to start school next week. What a nice sister I have!

It is always bittersweet leaving your old home for your new one. Everytime I go back to Northern California it is like my heart feels home. Even though things have changed for my family and I really don't have a so called "home" there anymore just being in the area feels like home. I think I have a memory on every street in Danville and as I drive around they all come flooding back. Those memories that are from a time when you had no real responsibility except to be a good kid. Those memories that are so innocent and sometimes seem so far away and yet at times seem only like yesterday. Everybody has them, they just vary in specific activities. Mine are playing hide-and -seek with the neighborhood kids on summer nights, practicing making fires down in the creek behind my house, jogging the Iron Horse Trail to the high school, first holding a boys hand in the Las Barrancas hills behind my house, experiencing my first kiss at the cemetary (yes I said cemetary, long story), making up dances in the backyard to Debbie Gibson, getting my own drivers license and feeling the freedom you feel behind the wheel of a car by yourself. I feel like I go into this odd early life crises when I am there because for a time I am no longer a thirty year old mother, I feel seventeen again and I can't believe that I have three children and I don't live there aymore. When I am home I feel my heart longing for those times again and the freedom it allowed from any REAL stress or worry and yet as I look around at my children I want only to provide a place for them to make those same kinds of memories. It is a wierd sadness and happy wistfullness that overcomes me when I am there and I am glad that I am only able to go back once or twice a year so that those feelings never get old. When I am leaving the area and I watch the last rolling golden hills with the dark green trees dotting the landscape fade away I always tear up and I feel that I only wish I could live there again. But I have to say as I pulled into Portland, into in area that has a very different kind of beauty I was glad to be back at MY home. We have had a lot of different houses over the past few years and have lived in a lot of different places but I realized that when my family, my husband and children, are together that is truely where I am happy and where my real home is. It really doesn't matter where we are, Utah, Vegas, or California. It makes me excited for my future and for my childrens futures and I can't wait to hear when they are grown what memories they made as children wherever we end up. California will always hold a part of me though and I love it there.