Hello – and thank you for stopping by.
 
 
Just before we get to today’s journal, I thought I might try to entice you to bring the best parts of being on the road into your own living space (room service may not be included LOL). It’s hotel living at home and it’s my post this week on Walmart.ca.
 
I hope you’re having a good week and we look forward to sharing some memories of this trip through Tulip Time in Amsterdam and into Belgium, when I can post pictures and stories here on Monday. In the meantime, today, according to our itinerary, we dock in Antwerp, Belgium and then tomorrow we hit up three places in the Netherlands.
 
Please pardon me for not updating you daily here; I wasn’t sure about how I was going to time journals to post at the times I needed them to. And I can’t take a chance on one not going up.
 
I have read your comments, though, on Facebook daily in response to my journals: the hoaxes, Rob’s nose, the importance of travel – if you can swing it – as a family. And, oh, thank you for your response to last week’s journal about having to let go several emails that I had read but just hadn’t gotten to answering. I so appreciate your understanding.
 
One of the posts I got last week when I was in the midst of what I described as a massive bout of writer’s (writers’?) block was about chores. Actually, a few people wanted to know how Rob and I divide things. And the answer is: we kind of don’t. Even though, as someone suggested, the way things are divided up when you are married, or within the first year or so, are the way things stay, I couldn’t disagree more.
 
We’ve changed in so many ways since those early years – and not just in terms of working – that it would be impossible to nail down our tasks and stick to them. Things change. For example, in the beginning I did all of the cooking. Rob was almost invisible in the kitchen. But as time went on and my life got busier (or I was on one of my stupid diets again), he would fend for himself, for Lauren and sometimes for me in the kitchen. I guess he figured if he was going to eat anything besides cabbage soup, he would have to learn to prepare pasta and make a good sauce!
 
So, cooking is just one of the ways things have changed. Now we love to do prep together in the kitchen or if I’m busy writing on a deadline, he’ll get dinner together. Alternatively, if he’s editing to send out a voice job (I have an audio book we’ll be hunkering down for when we come back next week), I’ll get dinner prepared and then we’ll sit for a bit, catch up with the previous night’s catches on the PVR and then get back to work. We work a lot. Me tapping away writing words at the keyboard, him tapping away editing out spoken words at his keyboard. And making sure this journal gets done.
 
Laundry is mostly Rob’s domain because he’s the hockey player (seems fair). He also won’t even let me make the bed, so sure is he about the abilities his stepmom passed on as an RN. (He does do some pretty superb corners.) We have someone who comes in biweekly to clean, so there’s no dividing there, while Rob’s a Mr. Fix-it in every sense of the word.
 
So I guess, in answer to the question about chores, Rob really handles more of them than I do (including walking Molly if it’s really miserable or early or both). He’s still in charge of making coffee, while I try to be the one to clean out the machine and its parts. And we definitely grocery shop together. I even trust him to do it alone – something that took a very long time.
 
It’s an ebb and flow, a fluid kind of exchange of duties and chores. But there is one thing that has never changed: both of us are extremely grateful and neither takes the other for granted, no matter what. There is a thank you every single day for the coffees that he makes, for the meals that I make, for the cleanup after supper. None of it is “his job” or “my job.” That’s how we roll – and it’s worked.
 
And this week, my job is his job: meeting, greeting, entertaining and having fun. We’re lucky to have a partnership that works so well, so smoothly. Unless he leaves me for Cooper, and I’ll break that to you on Monday if it happens!
 
Come back here tomorrow for a journal about one of the best shows I’ve seen in absolutely ages. And if you’re lucky, you’ll have the chance to see some version of it, too.