The Happy Place

Have you ever lost your happy place? How do they just slip away sometimes? Why do we tend to roll over and bask in to the gloom and doom at times? How do you get back to happy, when you loose it? How do you find that happy place again?

I packed my sweet husband up and sent him off with his friends for the weekend hoping he'll find his. We've been married almost 10 years (seriously, we're like 3 weeks shy of it so in all honesty, 10 years)...that sometimes feels like 2 and often feels like 50. Neither of those are a bad thing. Our lives are really busy and while we can usually roll along with it and keep it together, sometimes only by the seams, every once in a while, it just gets to be too much.

If you don't know, he works the mid-night shift as a patrol officer in Brentwood, "The Bubble" as we call it. While there really isn't too terrible much "excitement" in the bubble, the hours alone are more than enough to pile on a huge amount of tension and stress especially when you add on the hectic schedule that our kiddos keep. He's lucky to hit the sack by 9:00 and kids start coming in the door by 3:00 so that's 6 hours on a good day (when there's no court, no meeting, no dogs barking at the mail man, etc). I don't get too much more than that myself, but I don't spend 9 -10 hours a night in a car all by myself in the middle of the night either (this is where we ignore the gun and potential danger, for my sanity's sake). The past several weeks and possibly months have been exceptionally...how should we put it, busy, which leads to tense for sleepy parents. I had some "minor" surgery this past May which used up my vacation time for this summer so we've not had a chance to escape the chaos and catch a little downtime at all this year. So, when the opportunity for a weekend away arose, I was the first one to vote "yes" to the trip!

He'll be home sometime tomorrow, hopefully with that smile and sparkle back in is eyes. I'm not sure where his happy place is exactly, but here's hoping that it's somewhere between Spring Hill and Bristol.