Ending Radio Silence

Whew!  (That was a giant exhale for those of you who didn't hear it.)

We have been home for over a month now... I can NOT believe it.  I feel like I've been in a blender.  We landed on June 3 to a very sweet welcome party at the airport, lots of friends and neighbors stopping in to say hello and bring food, etc., and the boys have burned up the sidewalks and bike tires visiting long missed friends ever since.  It seems hard to believe that we are back and school starts in less than a month and our tropical adventure is behind us.

I'm absolutely opposed to going anywhere for the rest of my life that does not involve my friends.  However, as I knew would happen, I miss so many things about Hawaii.  My friend Carla asked me if I felt like I totally fit here in now, and I had to answer no.  I now have a longing for something that I didn't even know existed a year ago.  This time last year I was packing for a month at the beach.  And here I sit, how could I have imagined how much my life was about to be radically changed.

One thing that I miss the most about Hawaii is the voice of the Holy Spirit.  I can't explain it, but the voice of the Spirit is almost impossible to hear here because there is so much "chatter" in my head about general life stuff.  Even though I have intentionally kept our world small, I have not signed the boys up for even one organized sport, we haven't had a schedule or an obligation other than the absolute necessities, but there is this clamor to "do" here.  Paint rooms in your house, buy new clothes, fix your hair, do do do do do do do do do do do......

While I was in Hono, HI, a friend of mine came to visit.  She was staying on the North Shore with some folks who had moved to Tennessee from Hawaii and then moved back to Hawaii.  Katie said that this woman told her husband, "I have to go back to the island.  I have to be somewhere where they don't obsess about interior decor.  And I cannot fix my hair and make-up one more day or I am going to go insane."  She's right!  When Katie told me that, I sort of laughed thinking it must have been the folks that this lady hung around.  But it wasn't.  Even in my very real, loving, laid-back circle, there's this urge to have one of the houses from the West Elm catalog (all 2500 square feet of it! :)  T-shirts and shorts that I wore in Hawaii and felt perfectly adorable in now look really shabby.  I was actually looking at my shorts in the mirror yesterday thinking, "Have these shorts always looked this bad or do they just look like this here in Tennessee?"

I loved living where your swimsuit counted as underwear because you needed to be ready for the water at any moment.

I promise I will try to stop whining about where I live.  I realize that the whole time I was so far away I was pining for all the stuff that fills my life now.  And I spent a great deal of time and energy looking forward to coming home.  Brian is in Hawaii this week working though and it's absolutely killing me to Skype with him and see "my" pool, my yard with the palm trees, and my "fancy porch" in the background.  Ugh!  Why can't I just talk my friends and family into moving with me and then I can "have it all"! :)