Why bother?

Last Friday we bundled up the whole family in the car (Luke had off but we took Zach out of school and Dave took off the day from work), drove 100 miles to the nearest apple-picking glen, and spent a few hours doing farm stuff (our second farm trip in a week). We picked pumpkins, pears, strawberries, and raspberries - and we even picked some rogue mulberries (shhh!) from a tree near the parking lot. After a farm-friendly lunch and some apple pie and apple cider donuts, we turned around and drove (through Friday afternoon traffic for more than two hours) back home.

Why? Why do we do stuff like this? Why do we drive 200 miles and spend a whole day to pick some pumpkins and pears that are readily available at the supermarket three blocks away from us? Why do we coach soccer, volunteer at school, write blogs without getting paid, and make jam and applesauce instead of buying it? Why do we do stuff that takes so much time and doesn't seem to have any immediate payback?

I guess the answer is that we're doing things that we love. And if we don't do them, what is the alternative? Sitting at home and...not doing things?

Last week I had a bad cold - so bad that on Friday morning I could barely open my eyes at 7am. The prospects of me running a 10K on Saturday looked fairly poor. But on Saturday morning, I woke up and thought: What am I going to do instead? Stay at home and feel like a lump? So I ran it, and at the finish line I said to Dave, "Remind me next year to run this race. Because even though I always think I'm not going to be able to do it, it's always fun."

And...I've been home with a sick kid and haven't done a lick of exercise since then. So there you go. But still, my philosophy remains: Doing stuff is always better than not doing stuff.

Dave has been in Portland since Monday. On Monday night, when I tucked Zach into bed, Zach told me, "Mom, when Daddy is home, you can sleep in your bed. But when Daddy is in another dimension, you should sleep in my bed."

Also Zach wrote a long string of words (several groupings of all of the letters he knows) on a piece of paper, and announced that it was his Christmas list. "Great!" I said. "Will you read it to me?"

And so he proceeded to read: "Spy gear. Hot Wheels. Freight trains. Pretend dates - like from a palm tree. Plastic weeds. Styrofoam peanuts."

Now THERE's a list that I can fulfill. And just in case anyone thinks Zach is weirder than he already is, we just watched the movie "Bolt" and styrofoam peanuts figure prominently in the plot line. The plastic weeds I can't really explain.

Luke is in search of teenagers to hang out with. Last night he asked me if he only had six cousins and if there were any more he didn't know about - preferably teenagers. So we ran through the list of second cousins, but the ones who are teenagers live in Chicago and New York. "Are you sure I don't have any other cousins that I haven't met yet?" he wanted to know. Uh...yeah...I think so (?).

"You know," I reminded him, "Daddy doesn't have any cousins." This set Luke off into a new spiral of outrage. "Was he just mad about that...all the time?" Uh...no...I don't think so (?).