Sounds like a plan to me....

This life we live wears me out. I am thankful for all of the craziness that makes up this family. I am never bored and seldom left saying I wish I had something to do with my free time.

Tonight the entire tribe went on a mini-road trip. The reason is irrelevant and the activities are equally irrelevant. We ended up driving an hour to a neighboring city to meet the hubs for dinner after a long day at work. He is opening a new office in another neighboring city, also an hour away, after an unexpected job loss several months ago. The new job is a good thing, a trauma that ended up being a blessing in disguise. Either way, the hours on the road are long and sometimes erratic and sometimes we end up doing oddball things in order to get the whole family together. Tonight was one of those oddball nights.

Sometimes in life you need to hit the reset button. So. That is what we did.

Time in a car with my crew has always been an adventure. When I had three car seats strapped in the back and a precocious five year old riding shotgun, I had some fun drives. It is equally fun with a 22 year old who is traipsing across the east coast deciding on grad schools and three goofy seventeen year olds who closely resemble Larry, Curly and Moe when they are confined in a moving vehicle.

In the span of an hour of road time tonight I learned how to field dress a deer, the proper posture and breathing technique for running without breathing difficulties, which colleges are considered "public ivy league" nowadays, why a 2-stroke engine in a dirt-bike is the easiest to fix, the second jobs the seventeen year olds are planning on taking on, the financial goals everyone hopes to achieve in the next five years, and which bands are currently everyone's favorite.

There was also the discussion of a blood feud between two of the brothers that had me laughing so hard I was certain I'd be pulled over in spite of my diligence to not drive like I tend to do on a high-dopamine day, a rousing musical re-enactment of some eighties rap songs from my youth, and a serious conversation about college major options.

By the end of the night, I had laughed and cried over things that were both happy and sad, exciting and scary, sobering and encouraging. I am so thankful God gave me my crazy children the way that He gave them. Who knew? If things had gone according to my plan, I'd have one boy and one girl, 2.5 years apart...never would I have planned on the amazing gift that an only child for five years, followed by a crowd of triplets would be!!!! God's plan trumped mine, and how. His story for me is so much better than the one I imagined. It isn't as uneventful and pain-free as my story for myself was. But any good writer knows that the plot has to be layered and the characters have to have depth in order for the story to impact its reader. A linear plot and shallow characters are never the makings of the stories that we carry with us our entire lives.

By the end of the night, I had some time listening to the girl after all of the men had gone to bed ( they get up before dawn to go work out.....we talk until just before dawn and then chastise ourselves for not working out.)

Tonight's subject of discussion? Walking away from "the dream". The girl's dream from the time she could speak was to be a veterinarian. Actually, from the time she was three, the standard answer when asked what she wanted to be was an artist/veterinarian who traveled the world and owned a huge barn to keep all of her animals. From the time she was thirteen, she volunteered in a local vet clinic until she turned fourteen and a half, when they hired her.

Enter diabetes. T1D really has had no impact on what she can or cannot do with her life ( in the grand scheme) but it definitely caused her to laser focus her hopes and dreams. Talk about fine-tuning your priorities, a lifetime diagnosis two weeks before your sixteenth birthday will do that for you in a heartbeat. Long story short, vet schools are expensive ( think medical school pricing), far away and unscholarshipped. There is not much in the way of financial aid for a vet student and unless you run your own shop, the insurance benefits are not what she is looking for. Without dissecting her reasoning or going into all of the details, she made the call to walk away from "the dream" to pursue the life she feels is most important to her. As right as she knows it is for her personally, it is still a hard thing to reconcile. Today was one of those days when she was feeling acutely frustrated over her own maturity. Tough problem to have. A seventeen year old with long vision gets on her own nerves sometimes.

So. That is what we were talking about and she, being the crazy disciplined researching genius that she is, was running two windows of search engines looking for a particular educational program that would meet her new goals while we chatted. All of a sudden the pieces fell into place. A new plan with a new focus and different way to go about achieving the advanced degree required than we had thought about before!

It was nice to see her animated about the possibilities. It was a good ending to a Wednesday in the middle of a week that has felt ten days long already. It was the perfect culmination to our reset in general.

Time will tell if this is God writing her story or if she is currently wielding the pen, but it sounds like a plan to me.