Colorado Day One

Well, it’s been an interesting start to our vacation so far. Alison is sick. She’s got some kind of strange, croupy cough, so I stayed in the condo with her today while Kyle took Colin and Erin and went with the cousins for a hike at Piedra River. Erin came home hobbling. She twisted her ankle on the hike to the river. So at this moment, I am sitting on the “B” side of the condo (our digs) with Alison coughing and Erin elevating her swollen ankle. Colin says we are “dropping like flies.” I refuse to believe it. One of the things that I have been thinking about lately is how easy it is to look at the glass as “half empty”, and then to lament and point out to everyone the half empty glass. It’s not that I’m a totally negative person. It’s just that I like to look at things from all angles, and so often life seems to be filled with pointy, painful, complicated angles that seem to demand my rumination. And so I spend more time than necessary focusing my view on those angles, and not enough time realizing that there is always another angle. If the glass is half empty then it is also half full.

Erin is dealing with her sprained ankle like a trooper. The “glass half full” part of this is that as she and her dad spent an hour hiking back out, they got a chance to talk about things they might never had talked about, and to top it off, she kept telling him, “Thank you Daddy.” And Alison…well, it’s harder to find the half full glass in this. She would love to go fishing, hiking, swimming, and all the things that she usually does here, but instead she is stuck in the condo coughing like a three pack-a-day smoker. However, because I stayed back with Alison and didn’t hike with the rest of them, Mom and I got a chance to sit and talk today, and that was good. I had no agenda, no place to run off to, so we just had some good mother/daughter time. And Alison is getting lots of sympathy, and she absolutely loves that. The truth is, Erin’s ankle will heal, and Alison’s cough will get better and all will be back to normal. I want to look back and know that I saw it all as half full vacation, and not a half empty one. There is good to be found in all the crazy angles of life. Oh, and the mountains are beautiful, and I’m still smiling.