ponderings from a girl who used to travel

Looking for advice and Facebook seemed too public…..

Ben and I have a pretty big anniversary coming up next week. October 2 marks fifteen years for us. My parents have generously offered to hang with our kids for the weekend. After weeks of thinking and talking about it,  we are stumped as to what to do to mark such a big anniversary.

The original plan was back to Europe for our fifteenth. We realized about three kids ago that that's not going to happen anymore. The scaled back plan we adopted about a year ago was NYC for our fifteenth. But New York City seems like too much to take on for just a weekend, and a weekend is all we can make work right now- schedules are busy for us, for the kids, and for my parents. As is, the kids are going to miss some activities and possibly a half day of school just for us to get away for two nights.

We have been tossing around so many ideas, but nothing that we are super excited about. The pressure is on to make it a wonderful, memorable, romantic weekend trip and pressure leads to high expectations  which sometimes leads to disappointment. We've discussed Nashville, but we've been there so many times and Ben was even just there for work two weeks ago.  We love it, but it is becoming our go-to destination, so it might be hard to make it feel "special." We talked about Indianapolis and Chicago, but both require more driving time than we'd like.  Both destinations would give us a full day on Saturday there to enjoy ourselves, but would make Friday and Sunday mostly about driving- not our goal. I hate car time and Ben gets enough of it during the week at work.

We discussed staying in the St. Louis area so we could eliminate much of our travel time. This is probably where we are now. But since my parents are talking of taking the kids to Decatur, we would be silly to spend money on a hotel room for the weekend with an empty house sitting here at home.  I worry that despite our best intentions, if we spend our getaway weekend staying at home, we would get sucked into laundry and TV and dishes and all of the other normal and sometimes necessary  (but not very romantic) aspects to our life.  In other words, our big anniversary trip to Europe would have dwindled over the years to a weekend at home. We used to be such travelers. What happened? 

So this morning Ben brought up another idea and I don't know how I feel about it. (Hence the rambling post asking for help!) He wondered this: what if instead of having high expectations for a perfect two day trip that we just aren't, for whatever reason, all that excited about….. we just recognize that we would be better off celebrating with a longer trip in January or February when life slows down a bit? We wouldn't cancel our anniversary weekend altogether, we would just change the way we are thinking about it.  We would still spend some one-on-one time together next weekend while the kids off with my parents, but we'd just take the time here, without kids around, to work on some big projects on our house wish list that we've been wanting to do for two years now.

Is this as lame as I fear, or just practical? Are we better off chucking our high expectations for a perfect anniversary weekend to just embrace the chance to work together, uninterrupted, for 48 hours? Is this what four young kids and fifteen years of marriage looks like- so appreciative of grown up time that you don't even care what you do with it? ;)

And why do I even care so much about a perfect trip anyway? Ben and I can have fun walking around Target together on a Friday night; why have I let Facebook and all of its sharing of pictures of trips to Hawaii and New York and Paris make me feel like an anniversary has to be so over the top?

Or, is it just going to be disappointing in the long run to have spent our fifteen year anniversary painting our house or working on our fireplace? Should we lower our expectations for the perfect getaway weekend, but not lower them so much that we are doing projects around the house?

And can a staycation weekend in your hometown really feel like a getaway, or are we better off saving that money towards a more memorable trip this winter?

I know... this is a lot of rambling thoughts all in one eight inch post….. but I had hoped writing would give me some clarification on the subject. I wish it had. I don't ask for comments often, but I would love them this time around. What do you think? Will we feel disappointed in the long run if we don't celebrate, or am I making it too big of a deal?