Matt and I met in 2014, just as I was coming into my I want to travel all the time era. I’d always had wanderlust, but that year I had started putting it into practice, traveling over 100 days in a year for the first time. Together, we took that so seriously. We car-camped, we took hiking trips and saved all our pennies to take a year off and travel the world. 2017-2018 on which we traveled to 20+ countries together. Even after buying our house in 2019, traveling together was what we did. They were the moments that made us feel like “us”. In February of 2021, our lives changed forever in the greatest way imaginable, I gave birth to our daughter, Charleigh. In November 2022, we were blessed beyond measure again with our sweet little boy, Liam. After that, we’d taken a step back from this side of “us” and happily stepped into the roll of parents.
Now, before you think I don’t understand how beautiful of a life we have as a family of four, or how lucky we are to have our babies, I’m fully aware that we are abundantly blessed! But honestly, our trip away from our kids to Mexico City last June was even better for us than I ever could’ve imagined. Before this trip, the longest we’d been away from Charleigh was 36 hours, when I was giving birth to Liam, and the longest I’ve been away from Liam was 12 hours for an extra long work shift. I started to think that I wouldn’t be able to enjoy myself being away from them, but, luckily, that wasn’t the case at all.
When we woke up before dawn on the day of departure, all I wanted to do was wake the kids up and hug them. I’m a very morbid person on flight days, so all I could think was we were going to crash and die because I wanted a selfish weekend away from them – ridiculous, I know, but it’s just where my brain goes. As we walked up to the airport, there was the briefest of moments that we thought, well, do we just eat the cost of everything and go home? Thankfully, we didn’t do that… we walked in, boarded our flight and took off.
Our flight took off just after the sun peeked over the horizon and this view as we sped down the runway instantly took me from an anxious state to a state of wanderlust. Matt and I settled in, watched some Netflix that we had downloaded and enjoyed time talking to each other with no interruptions. We had just about the shortest layover sanely possible and boarded our flight to Mexico. We had gin + ginger ales and happily spent one-on-one time together.
Upon landing, we jumped into “us” mode and didn’t stop for three whole days. We walked at least 20k steps each day. We ate what we wanted, when we wanted. We explored, saw archaeological artifacts, spontaneously drank mimosas and held hands walking down the street. I’ve already written our detailed, travel journal type post, so I won’t dive deep into that, but what I wanted to dive into is how amazing this experience was for Matt and me.
Obviously, we chose to have kids and we love to have adventures with our kids. 99.9% of our adventures since Charleigh was born, are with the kids in tow. While we knew we had missed this, we didn’t realize just how much we had. We realized how little we had been connecting to each other just for who we are as individuals. We realized how much we needed to carve out time for dates.
We are so very lucky that my parents offered to do this for us. It’s something we didn’t ever expect to get, but when my mom offered, and genuinely offered, we jumped on it. Now, we’re asking for it each year! Again, we have our kids on the vast majority of our adventures, but this time was so precious, so sweet and we’re just so grateful. They’ve since given us two national park date nights too (one in Yosemite and one in Big Bend) when we happened to be on trips together for us to get out and hike and those have been beyond magical. Just the ability to explore like we used to is so special and so appreciated.
I wanted to be transparent about the fact that even though we adore taking our kids and we talk a lot about how your lifestyle doesn’t have to totally change; just continue it with your kids, this was the most special time for us as a couple. So, in my self-care era, I’m just trying to take care of myself and my marriage, I wanted to say if you have the opportunity to take time for your relationship or yourself, take them up on it. You will find yourself rejuvenated in so many aspects of your life.
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