I miss daddy already and he only flew out this morning. Only 20 more sleeps until he gets home. When he gets home I am going to give him a surprise.

He said

So, the hardest part is always the leaving — it’s the longest point from which I will be away from my girls and the furthest from my return. When I took the trip last time, it was my brother Matthew and the other Creative at our store, Jordan. There was comfort in numbers – especially when one of those numbers was my sibling. This trip is longer, and all on my own. And as I’m sitting here in Pearson Airport awaiting the connector to San Francisco, I am definitely feeling it.
That said, I am also a little excited about the trip too. I was fortunate enough to have my second training destination back at Cupertino, and this time with a bit more extra time to explore and see one of my favourite cities in the world – San Francisco (or “San-San-Kiss-Ko” as Emelia says). The last time we were here it was for a week — well Sunday to Friday to be precise with our downtime, only in the evenings. This time around, I am getting two weekends that are total free time.

The first weekend I am visiting with my good friend Lee and his wife Peggy in Sacramento, and the second is still up in the air though I am hoping to connect with my Aunt Babs, Uncle Don, and their family.
Because I am away for three whole weeks which will afford me a reasonable chunk of duty free shopping, I used my resource of Lee and ordered some things online and had them shipped to him so that I could pick them up this coming weekend. Funny, but before I even left for the week, I had already shopped my way into a new pair of shoes, jeans and the enamelled tin camp coffee mugs that Danielle and I wanted for our trips in Wolfie. I’ll be sure to hit up Amoeba Records in San Francisco, and then the only other thing I’ll be sure to take advantage of duty free, is some dirt cheep booze!

Tomorrow is the first day of training, and while all you Canadians are enjoying family, food and fun, I will be on the main campus of Apple getting badged up and shopping in the Company Store. It’s little solace for what I will be missing out back home — at Holiday Pay which will also help.

Given this whole big trip away, I planned long in advance – with the help of Poppa – one last trip for the season in Wolfie. While it wasn’t far away, it was just what we needed before I take off to Amercia.

The only hitch was, whether the driveway and roadwork would be done in time, so that we could get the trailer out. I ended up having to let Danielle in on the surprise a few days early so that I could sick her on the workers during the day to make sure the trailer was in a position to be able to leave as soon as we picked up Emelia up from her Sparks meeting on Thursday night.
And in the end we managed to get out and get (20 minutes) away to the most perfectly weather cooperating weekend. The nights were a little brisk in the trailer, and we found we need to have an off season look at the heater blower to get it working properly, but overall, I was completely happy with our little weekend away, and last trip of the season for Wolfie. In fact we think that we may make this weekend at Fanshawe Provincial Park our last outing of the year, every year!

The camping came to an end a little too quick, and we very quickly transformed into the rush around like a chicken with my head cut off trying to get everything packed and ready for the all-to-early alarm this morning, but in the end I was very happy to have had that chance to be with just Danielle and Emelia if even for a couple of days, to recharge me before this big trip. Here’s to hoping the trip is amazing and flies by in the blink of an eye! For those keeping track at home, and I know Danielle and Emelia are, only 20 more sleeps till we’re back together.

She said

Today was the day I have been dreading since John first found out he had this new position. This was the first day of 21 away from us as a family. I have to say this will be the longest three weeks of our lives to date. John and I are accustom to doing everything together, we are our own little family unit and with little family of my own our little unit is very close.

I think it hit harder today because this is a family weekend and I was on Facebook for a bit today and seeing everyones post about dinners with family and it hurt, a lot. Thank goodness for the amazing family I married into because they have treated me like one of their own since I came into their lives and even more so since the passing of my mother.

But enough about the pity party I want to focus on the wonderful part of the weekend. When John got home from work on Monday night he said he had to ruin a surprise he had been working on with his father for a few weeks now. He had planned and booked a couple nights away at Fanshawe in our trailer as a family of three before he had to leave. Wonderful, but there was a complication. As we have mentioned a few times in the last few weeks we are in the middle of a major construction project on our street. We are getting to the tail end of it but there was one problem, we were trapped in the driveway with no way of getting out.

On Wednesday the construction workers moved the trailer to the lawn because they had to replace the interlock brick driveway because of the extensive damage done during construction. All fine and good but now we couldn’t get Wolfie off our lawn because we had no way of getting out on to the street. After much nagging (bitching really) I managed to get the construction workers to get us off the lawn and on to the street in time to pack our trailer Thursday night.

By the time Emelia was done her Sparks meeting on Thursday we were just about ready to go. We arrived after dark and got our first challenge of setting up the trailer blind with little light to guide us. But we are getting good at this setting things up and in short order we were ready, drinks pored, fire built and ready for some serious family time. Emelia got to bed quite late and she crawled into bed with us because of the chilly nighttime temps but all in all it was a perfect start to our mini-vacation in the city.

The two days was exactly what we needed, lots of time as a family, no distractions of home just time together. So thanks so much to John and Doug for pulling this off! I really needed this.

And then we came to today, the morning we were all dreading. I know it has been hard for John, he is so excited for this amazing adventure he is on, he is in California for three weeks, he is at Apple headquarters and this is the first next big step in his Apple career. But it was hard I know.

We were talking yesterday who the next three weeks would be hardest on, honestly it was equal. I am single parenting here, managing the house, the daycare and well our lives. He is deep in intensive training but he is away from home. Now I have to say he is not getting a ton of sympathy from me being able to spend three weeks in bea

utiful California and he has quite the social calendar already set up so I don’t exactly feel bad from him but I know he was feeling it today when we had to say the two hardest words ‘good-bye’.

But since starting to type my part of the post John has landed, he has already had a FaceTime call with Emelia and I and I have got Emelia down for the night.

So now it is time for me to breath after a busy and emotionally draining day. Tomorrow morning we are one day closer to being back home under one roof. That’s it for me for now.