Acceptance.

Since it’s been determined that we’re not leaving here anytime soon, we’ve had to refocus our thoughts and energy. For whatever reason, this was relatively easy for me. I have school dumping all kinds of stuff on me to keep me busy and I have a Kaden and husband to take care of every day. So I’m, finally, good. But poor Stu is sitting in a different boat. He’s just so over everything here and is more than ready to go home. We can’t… This is a predicament.

So we’ve booked our plane tickets and hotel for our Rome trip and he has been downloading Podcasts about Rome to listen to. This has been AWESOME. He’s already called me twice today to tell me about things he’s learned and places he wants to make sure we see while we’re there. We also watched a documentary on the Catacombs the other night. We’re trying to stay focused on the R&R aspect of this trip. We haven’t been out of this country for a while (save Omani border runs) and it can get suffocating after a while (quite literally in about a month as temperatures hit the 90s/100s again).

My goal for the trip is to indulge in some good Italian wine, bread and cheese (and probably plenty of pizza and pasta), while being immersed in a language I have little experience with (which is sure to be a refreshing change from the hair-ball-in-your-throat language I am surrounded by here).

We want to remember that if we want, we can always go back to Italy another time if we miss some things the first time. With a toddler, and only having seven days, we don’t need to over-schedule sight-seeing. I absolutely cannot wait to get there (or just get OUT of here). I hope that when we come back we will be rejuvenated for at least a few months so Stu doesn’t feel quite so isolated.

For me, I’m really glad I’ve gotten used to this lifestyle. I basically only go outside twice a week and that’s on the weekends… and usually for groceries (the roof doesn’t count), and I’m finally ok with it. I’ve become a total homebody and it works for me now. I love finding and perfecting new recipes for my boys and getting my school work done in between playing with Kaden… maybe some Wii Fit and the elliptical when Kaden naps. That’s my simple life and I can do it for a long as we need to (or the US economy forces us to). I think I just had to acknowledge that we have to be here and our friends and family’s lives aren’t going to wait for us to get back. They’re going to do things without us, many of our friends we’ll lose touch with, and that has to be ok. This is what’s best for our little family now and that’s the best we can do. Anyway, report for A&P time. (I need to find out what my Dad got in this class so I can try to one-up him. Hehe. He was always the science one with his degree in Microbiology, but I’m ready to be the scholarly one of the family!)