Friday, December 2, 2011

The Year of Adventure

So I keep saying that next year is our year of adventure. A few years ago I started assigning themes to our year for some reason, lol. The year we brought Clarissa home I kept saying that it was the year of adoption, when all the excitement and adoption stuff was going on.

After that crazy year I kept saying that the next year was going to be the year that nothing happened. As much fun as the adoption was, it was mentally exhausting by the time it was all over and I needed a year where there were no major changes, no big vacations and we could just get into the groove of having three kids and let everything mellow out a bit.

Then this year just sort of become the year of my early midlife crisis or something, lol. I've been calling it my year of reflection, where I needed to sort some stuff out and decide where my life is going. It's kind of been the year of crappy health problems as well, unfortunately, which is kind of what prompted the year of reflection.

Anyway, after everything I've been through this year I've been declaring next year our year of adventure. We're going to get out of the house more, go on vacations, try new things and have some fun. My therapist said that it's interesting to make a graph of your life and look at when you were happiest and what was going on in your life that made it happy. It occured to me that I was a lot happier when we were going on regular adventures. We used to take a lot more vacations, spend a lot more Saturdays at the lake or on a day trip in the car exploring and we always had something fun going on. That has stopped in the past few years. It needed to stop, or at least slow down, for a while for several reasons and that was fine, but now it's time to bring some fun adventures back into our lives. We all need it.

So that has been my focus over the past several weeks, trying to come up with some fun adventures for next year. Today I was talking to Josh about how I wanted him to help me come up with some ideas of fun things we could do next year and it turned into the two of us writing a list of fun things and that turned into an even better idea!

What we've decided to do as a family is spend the next three weeks coming up with ideas of things we want to accomplish or adventures we want to take next year. Some of them are big things and some of them are small things. Some of them cost money and some of them are free. So far we've added things like go geocaching, go hiking, rent a cabin, finish the backyard movie theater and have a neighborhood movie night, plant a garden, fly a kite, go to the zoo, visit a pumpkin patch, go to Oregon, invite the neighbors over for ice cream and game night, build a model plane/car and fly/drive it...the list goes on. We're still working on it, but it has prompted some fun discussions and a lot of "hey, you know what I've always wanted to do?" conversations.

We will finish our list by the end of December and then we're going to type it up and hang it on the fridge. As the year goes on next year we're going to do everything on the list and cross them off as we do them. We're all ridiculously excited about this! I don't think I've been this excited about anything in quite some time, actually! This will be so great for our family. Lately it seems like we get to the end of the summer or the end of the year and we have a list of things we wished we had done but never got around to. Hopefully our year of adventure will change that.

One thing that I definitely knew I wanted to do was to plan some kind of getaway in January. I get super blah every January for some reason. It's a long dark month and it always seems like it goes on forever! So I've been looking for a fairly inexpensive, easy getaway that we can do for a couple of days in January to give us something to look forward to and to break up the long month a little bit.

Today I found it! I got an e-mail about an hour ago that the hotel we love in a middle of nowhere town about an hour and a half from here is having a 50% off sale! We stayed at that hotel a couple of years ago when our exchange student Melissa was here and we took the kids skiing and and we took a sleigh ride and fed some elk, which was SO fun. The hotel is so cozy and adorable and so much fun to stay at and the elk feeding place is close by, so it's a really fun winter getaway. The boys are out of school for a couple of days in January so I called Shawn and told him to get the day off and I called the hotel and booked it for two nights! I think that will be the perfect start to our year of adventure!!

2 comments:

Shawn said...

I can't wait for our year of adventure, too. It will be awesome. I love you!!

Josh said...

It is going to be so much fun! I'm Excited! :-D

-Josh