Shards of Beauty

Sometimes life is too full.  It overwhelms.  There are days I feel so much I wind up numb.

There are moments anymore where I don't know whether I'm in the throes of hormonal shifts, or I've simply reached a stage of my life where I cannot look back over so many years without stumbling into emotions of all kinds.  I miss people and places and situations that will never come again.  I look forward knowing certain opportunities have passed, and yet at the same time I don't feel limited because life is full of so much.

A couple of weeks ago my son and I went to our Latin lesson and the teacher didn't show.  We reviewed our notes a bit, wrote phrases on the white board (we left up a sentence that roughly translates to "Take your things and leave!" because it amused us), and then left early because we could.  It was beautiful out, so with our extra time we stopped at the beach.

Florida!

We just got back from a trip to Florida!  

Sunset in Ft Lauderdale

Kids on Siesta Key Beach, Sarasota

I really needed it, and I'm so glad we went.  Normally I'm fine with winter, but this one has been so oppressively cold and miserable that it kind of broke me.  It was lovely to shed our coats and boots and walk barefoot in the sand even for just a little while.

We've never taken a family vacation that wasn't specifically about seeing relatives before.  This was a purely decadent family fun adventure.  The first two weeks of February aren't an unusually busy time for our store, I didn't have any big rehearsals, the kids weren't doing anything pressing, so Ian and I found people to sub for us in our jobs, we put the dog in a kennel, pulled the kids out of school, and headed south!