far away, yet too close

Sometimes I wonder if we had been posted further away, would we still feel the pressure to always go back and visit family and friends? And why do we always do the visiting?

A few months ago when the weather was still really bad, I was planning a trip back to Sk to visit family. The day before I remember it snowing and phoning my folks and saying, 'ya know...I just don't know if we should still come?' To which I remember my Mother saying something like, 'you can do it. Just take your time.' And then I think back to around Christmas when they were all s'posed to come here and the weather was bad again, and she was ready to call the whole trip off. What? 3 adults in a vehicle and you're ready to call the trip off, but when it's me, JUST ME, and my 4 kids, I'm s'posed to just drive slow!?! Does that even make sense?

Fast forward now to the present and we're planning our summer holidays. Who knew they could be so stressful. Everyone wants a piece of us, or I should say Steve (apparently his family thinks I'm a bee-atch) and so we're looking at 4 or more trips back to Sk. And with gas prices as high as they are, each one of those trips will avg $200. That's not even including doing stuff while we're there!

But what infuriates me (and this bugged me when we lived 1.5 hrs and 4 hrs away) is that no-one will come visit us b'cos there's "nothing here". Excuse me? WE ARE HERE! Is it not good enough that we are here? Must there be something else to see and do?

So at this point, Steve and I are both getting headaches whenever we even think of summer. Which I'm pretty sure is NOT s'posed to happen. And we just want to stay home. Which at this point, sounds like a pretty good idea.