It’s one thing to spend a Labor Day weekend laboring, if that was the plan. But it’s quite another to spend your entire weekend just trying to keep your head above water, when you were really just trying to enjoy yourself and your family.This past weekend my little family and I headed up North with the rest of the valley. Now I’ve been feeling sinus-y this week, and I really wasn’t looking forward to it in the first place. I really really tried to talk my husband out of going, even to the extent of looking up the weather in Pinedale and whining to him about the “scattered Thunderstorms” that were supposed to happen over the weekend. I played the “Emma will be too scared to sleep” card, the “kids aren’t feeling very well” card, even the “we’re having a party on Monday and I’ve got a lot to do” card. None of these worked. His hand was better. He had an ace in the hole; I had been asking to get out of this heat for months, darn me. What was I thinking.

We drove the three hours to Pinedale in what was the nicest car ride I’ve ever had with my children. They were very patient and calm, and no one really complained about anything. This was the highlight of our trip. We arrived in Pinedale to tour the cabin we’d be staying in, a very old shack with a very old outhouse. I’m not a prissy girl, and this didn’t bother me a bit. But Emma wanted nothing to do with that outhouse. She’d held her pee for three hours and after taking a look at that outhouse proceeded to hold her pee for another three. And when she was finally desperate enough, she begged me to let her just go behind a tree. She would have preferred that over the stinky, dark little closet. I didn’t really blame her.

But before Emma even had to try out the outhouse, some of the men we were with went three-wheeling. Not a half an hour after we arrived, one of the men ran himself into a tree. Thank God he wasn’t more badly injured, but he did have to be taken to the ER for stitches. Five more hours gone of our 24 hour vacation.

Shortly after the men left for the hospital, the other mom and I decided to take our children out to see the roaming horses on their land. The other mom told me the horses were pretty skittish and they tended to run away if we made too much noise. This was alright with me, I’ve never known horses and they really are very large and intimidating animals, especially when you have little to no horse sense. The only tidbit of survival training I had to my knowledge was, “Don’t walk behind them.”

So the other mom and I walked out into the woods with the kids and came upon six lovely horses grazing in the undergrowth. I assumed that once one of the kids decided to say anything, the horses would run away and that would be the end of that. I was wrong. The kids were extraordinarily quiet, (why did they pick now to be quiet?) and two of the horses came directly up to our little party to say hello. And I mean RIGHT up to us. I’m the kind of person who likes to look people in the eye and read their body language when I first meet them. I believe that you can tell a lot about a person that way, more so than you can from the words coming out of their mouth. This principle does not work nearly as well with horses. The horse’s face that was inches from my own nose was a blank slate. That horse could have been saying, “Hi! I haven’t seen a human in a while, are you nice?”, but for all I know it could instead have been thinking, “Hi! Do you taste good?”. And I wasn’t ready to find out which.

Not to brag, but I did the right thing. While my whole body was shaking and my mind was begging me to grab my daughter and make a break for it, I managed to say in a calm voice, “Let’s…. go back now.” And I took Emma’s hand and we started back to the cabin. Very slowly. And the horses followed us. Very slowly. And we sped up a little. And they sped up too. And again my legs said, “RUN!!!!” But we didn’t. And eventually these (probably perfectly nice) horses decided that eating was more interesting than we were after all. So we went home.

But having loose horses (and who knows what else!) around the area made taking those nature hikes I had looked forward to a difficult problem. Maybe if my husband wasn’t sitting in the ER with his friends I would have tried again, but I wasn’t leaving the grounds alone after that.

Saturday evening the kids went to bed nicely and we sat around the porch talking for hours. At some late hour we all decided to turn in, but no sleep was to be had by most of us. One of our friends must have some serious sinus issues because I’ve never heard a human being make those kinds of noises in their sleep before. I’m not sure if you could call it snoring, because it really sounded more like he was fighting for breath while sleeping with his face in a shallow puddle.

By the time I was tired enough to sleep through the noise, my daughter screamed out from her bed. The cabin had no night lights of course, so I had to go to her. This was no easy task in the pitch blackness, and I really hoped she didn’t have to use the outhouse right then. The other woman had told me that sometimes the horses will hang out nearby and they’ve surprised her in the middle of the night before. Oh goody! But luckily Emma just wanted to check in with me, and she went back to sleep. For a moment. Then she was up every hour until sunrise, at which point my children were the first ones up. Exhausted, I got up to keep them busy and quiet for the rest of the sleepers. (i.e. My husband and his snoring buddies.)

We spent a rather uneventful few hours in the morning ATVing and shooting paint balls before heading back for home. The drive home was again the most relaxing part of the trip.

The next day I woke up at 7:30 to clean the house for Emma’s birthday party at 3:00. I didn’t stop working until the first guests arrived. The party went smoothly, we went boating on the lake and I didn’t fall off the knee board this time. But I did manage to chip a front tooth. The carnage from Emma’s huge pile of presents was still on the floor when we fell into bed last night, and most of it is still there.

This morning we all had to get back to school and to work, and my well-meaning parents showed up to help me clean up the party mess. Apparently lack of sleep and non-stop activity for the past week has driven me past the end of my rope without even realizing it. Because I literally kicked my folks out of my house. I couldn’t stop myself and I’m sorry for the way I handled things, but I needed to be left alone.

If there’s a moral to this story it is to trust your first instincts. If you feel like you’re taking on too much, stop. It’s okay to say no. You can never go wrong by choosing to do nothing, but you can go terribly wrong when you take on too much.

p.s. We’re already planning to go back up North in a few weeks. I never learn.