The Making Of a Family Story

Two things that you must know about me before I begin: 1) I am a slave to my routine. How do I maintain a fitness program? Routine. How do I retain my (relative) sanity with a four-year-old and twins? Routine. How do I manage my household? Routine. I am not a fan of improv when it comes to life, but I am abundantly aware that the routine is going to get shaken up whether I like it or not. 2) I am a firm believer that if you are going to laugh about something later, it's best to laugh about it in the moment.

In the midst of an enormous record breaking heatwave here in the twin cities, we fell victim to the inevitable power outage.  Less than an hour into losing our air conditioning, I was definitely not keeping my cool, nor was the rest of the family. Sweats were breaking, tempers were flaring, and kids were waking. At about 9:30, I put on my matriarch pants and marched the whole fam damily out to the car which would carry us on our adventure to find a cool place to lay our heads.  Lacking internet, but utilizing our smart (and alarmingly slow) phones, we headed straight to a hotel laden area of Minneapolis right near the Mall of America.  To our dismay, each hotel notified us that it was going to be tough to find a hotel for the evening.  Every other sweaty person with no power had the same idea we had, the ENTIRE TWIN CITIES METRO AREA was sold out of hotel rooms.  We were still in a relatively good mood.  I wasn't really trying to think about the fact that these kids were all going to need to get settled in somewhere new and fall (hopefully) soundly asleep again. We called my mom who lives in a wee little condo (compared to the space that we are used to rolling around in), and headed off to Edina.  We have other family closer, but they are on the same grid as we are, and also had no power.

We arrived, divvied up the sleeping arrangements, and then tried our darndest to get to sleep.  Without sharing every detail of what followed, I will only tell you that the Twinstroms are used to sleeping only in their cribs. In their 18 months, they have only slept away from home for a week when we went to Florida, and it easily took them two days to adjust to the new sleeping arrangements there.  When they are asleep in their own cribs, they are amazing sleepers (remember what I said about routine? Yeah, that), but away from home in pack and plays, not so much.  We finally did get a wink of sleep, but it was just that, a wink.

In recovering from our little adventure, it occurred to me that THIS is what makes those family stories. The ones that start with, "remember that one time..." The status quo doesn't make the headline of the family news, it's those little adventures, those times that the routine gets thrown an amazing curveball, and everyone has to adjust.  Going with the flow only makes the story better, because if someone goes too far beyond pouting, the story gets lost and becomes a bad memory.  We're not in the business of making bad memories in the Lindstrom family, we would like to collect the good ones. Now that we are cool and well rested, I am laughing. This is definitely one for the "remember when" file.