driving 1028 km

had to drive to holland again. house not sold yet.....if you are interested let me know. house will be rented out, so i had to drive up to get things ready. get my car loaded with personal belongings to take back to ticino. it is a long drive, not something i am looking forward to. i like to get  over it as quick as possibile. 1028 km if i choose the fastest road and do not get lost. then i always hope that there will be no traffic jams or roadworks. so now, i leave at 4.30 am, that seems the best hour, workdays or weekends. people will ask me if i do not think it is a nuisance driving all that way by myself. i have had enough time to think about that. this time i had 9.55 hrs, including 1.10 hrs of gas- and pee breaks. never been this fast i think. if i drive with my boys, it would be who can be the loudest during the trip, aka arguing about anything imaginable. and that is not a fuss for me. it took me 16 yrs to get used to;) what would it be like to have along someone i would have to make polite conversation with, who would maybe like to stop and eat, or has different pee times as i do? with my sons i stop and eat driving up north, so the trip takes 1,5 hrs more. we have our favorite places along the road. when we drive back home no one wants to stop, we just keep trucking. i have considered to take a long a friend, but upto now that has not happened. no one needed to go up there. bringing along somebody would be quite an assignement for me. i am very pushed by the clock. not that i will speed, but i have my schedule from which i will not budge. get to destination asap. it is such a drag sitting there and concentrate. there will be a break every 2 hrs, my bladder can not hold out much longer. a friend of mine would like to come along one day, but she said that on a long trip like that she would also like to visit some towns. oh my lordie! to see the sights because she cannot stand sitting in a car for a very long time. well, that would make the trip at least 10 hrs longer. and that is not what i am waiting for. my conclusion is driving and having someone yapping away, is not what makes me happy. so all things considered, i am very happy to be alone. my mind goes 200 km a minute. luckily i do not tweet, because that would be a disaster. so much comes to my mind and so much happens on the road, that i could tweet continiously. and i would surely not reach my destination;) dutch friend d. said that maybe one day she and other dutch friend d. and i could drive to holland all together to share gas and whatever. nice proposition. but ladies let me get one thing straight. you two will be sitting in the back of the car, doing whatever you want to do. but as the rule goes ' to not talk to the driver while the car is in motion'!

life after kids

we still have our sons, we did not give them up for adoption or anything, but i finally was able to cut the umbilical cord. i have been saying for years, i will leave them home alone only when big boy is 18 so he will be an adult and can be responsible for his little brother. but this year i was so gung ho on going to our house in the mountains for a night, and the boys do not want to come along, and hubby dear is not happy to be there always by himself, that i started questioning my vision of how to take care of my sons. and i said to myself 'at 15 years of age, you would be home alone for two weeks in a row. get a life girl and see if they can take care of themselves a bit. you have tought them everything they need to know!'. so i left the boys alone with three friends one night, and hubby and i had a great time at the village feast of niva. and i was hooked;). since everything had worked out so well the first time, little boy had asked me if he could have another sleepover with some friends before the end of summervacation. so that was last night. ofcourse i threathened with grounding if the house would be a mess on our arrival, things would be broke, ecc. i knew there would be more than the four friends announced, but the other ones left at a reasonable hour. they did a great job at getting everything in order. last night sitting there on our porch, with a great view of mountain tops, i was thinking 'now our lives after kids starts'. if children leave the home, it must be not easy to find a balance in the relationship again. i think that hubby dear buying that old house, did one of the best things ever. instead of not knowing what to do together, we bond to create something that is ours again. we did the family, we did the  all year round house, and now we start a new life up there at 1200 meter. we work side by side, we meet new people, and we are very happy also just to sit there with a glass of wine and enjoy our surroundings. it does not mean that i will leave my two boys alone every weekend, but once in a while i will give myself the privilege to do what i enjoy very much.