Tempo

Vermont, 2014

It's funny looking at this serene picture of Vermont and thinking, well, how frenetic the last few months (years?) have been.

As we caught up with friends, it seemed like a theme was beginning to emerge. 'I've been going a million miles a minute at work,' one of them said. Or 'I actually passed out at work, I've been traveling so much.' There were also a lot of 'I'd love to have a third (or second) baby but I am just so, so tired.' (We sound like a fun bunch, don't we!?) Everyone was kind of trying to let loose and be who we would have been at a wedding a decade ago, but it was hard to rally, given all of the above.

I guess in your mid-thirties (gulp), it's just a time when your career is at its most intense, or is in transition somehow, and we and a lot of our friends have lots of small kids. Some of it is New York, perhaps, but a lot of these friends lived in D.C., or Portland, Maine, or elsewhere. So it's not just the city.

I tried to catch up with one friend over breakfast at the inn we stayed at, but Will had to do some work so was squirreled away on his laptop in a corner and I was chasing Axel in circles around the hotel while he cried, 'I lost my airplane!' on repeat. Meanwhile, our friend was negotiating some argument between her two kids, one of whom was crying because they'd just tripped on something, and I thought, ack, we have a long road ahead of us (her children were maybe 4 and 6.)

Don't get me wrong, we feel so so grateful for our brood and our work and all the rest of it, but it does make me wonder when everyone around us also feels like they have a hundred plates spinning in the air. Does it settle down eventually? Last night, for instance, Will got up and worked (cue paper airplane chaos), then we went to a brunch, loaded our crew into a car, drove for 8 hours or somesuch, and then I bundled the kids into bed and got on my laptop to do some work. And then Ozzy was up 3 or 4 times.

This morning, as I was unpacking some of the kids' clothes, Axel saw the suitcase and got in a complete tizzy saying, 'Black car? I go too!' while having a big old meltdown. Poor kid is feeling kind of weary, and so are we. I am a huge booster for travel with kids, but there's definitely some kind of cost benefit analysis I am too worn out to do.