Post-Vacation Non-Blues

I was expecting this week to be awful.

I was gearing up for a week of depression, apathy, and chocolate. I was prepared with multiple seasons of Doctor Who, the crappiest pop-lit I could find at Costco, extra butter and sugar for baking emergencies, and a whole drawer of clean yoga pants and t-shirts. I mentally gave myself permission to become a useless blob of post-vacation husband-missing unshowered blah on the couch for a whole week.

But then a funny thing happened. My friends intervened.

The Ogre left on Sunday, after three days of beach-house bliss. Even the sudden appearance of bronchitis didn’t dampen my spirits during those three wonderful days (which may have had less to do with the beach house and more to do with the prescription cough syrup the concerned OB ordered me to take). We spent hours on the practically deserted beach with the minions and my parents, working on swimming with Sienna, gathering shells with Charlotte and Liam, paddling around in kayaks, and eating sandy sandwiches. We watched the sun set over the water in the evening, set off fireworks on the beach, ate some seriously delicious seafood, and found the perfect solution to the chocolate-covered strawberry dilemma. We had an amazing vacation.

But like all vacations, it came to an end. The Ogre left for Vegas to teach his summer class and have meetings with his dissertation advisers, my parents took us to Costco to stock up for a hurricane and then went back to Texas, and the kids and I were left alone, facing five bleak weeks.

I was ready to wallow. But then my neighbor called and invited us over for a play-date and I thought, “eh, why not? Wallowing can wait.” So we went. And then the Ogre called to tell me that he had called one of our best friends from college, who we haven’t seen in years, and asked her to come visit me, and she had agreed. Not only had she agreed, but she had taken ten days off work and booked her flight.

Then last night another friend stopped by out of the blue, just to see how we were doing and ask if I needed anything, and to offer to take the kids one night after he gets off work so I could get some blogging done. And then this morning our neighbor stopped by and took Sienna and Charlotte to story-time at the library, along with her seven children. And then my other neighbor offered to meet me at confession this afternoon so we could trade child-watching duties while the other gets a soul-scrubbing.

So, you see, my friends are making wallowing pretty impossible. And I’m extremely grateful for it. The next five Ogre-less weeks certainly won’t be easy, but I’m also starting to realize that they won’t be quite as lonely as I had envisioned. I think I’ll look at this time as an opportunity rather than a trial. A chance to make new friends, spend more time with my neighbors, do things for them as well as letting them do things for me, and maybe even learn to spray wasps’ nests instead of letting out girlish screams and begging the Ogre to do it for me.

(Not really on that last one.)

(Also, I still plan on baking lots of chocolatey goodness and reading crappy pop-lit. That’s my gift to myself for being husband-less in the third trimester.)