Our 1st try at dreaming

I am not a natural dreamer. Some people are. I’m just not one of them.

I’m more of a realist. You know…if someone comes to me with an idea I’ll ask all the questions about how that could logistically happen.

Brian, though, he’s a dreamer. Always has been. Not a week goes by when I don’t hear the words “Babe, I have an idea.”

I’m grateful for his dreaming mind because he taught me how to dream and showed me that ultimately anyone can dream.

Our 1st try at dreaming together was in the Fall of 2014. We were coming out of a messy season. I had found out about my BCRA 1 and 2 mutations; we had a foster baby (Baby A) that we had been fighting tooth and nail to keep in our home; and honestly I was just tired.

I was not in the right headspace to dream at the time. But it didn’t matter. Brian knew it was the very thing that I needed most.

So we snuck away for a long weekend to the cutest bed and breakfast where we stayed in a secluded cabin hidden back in the woods. I had no plans for the weekend. Zero. I just wanted to be.

We stopped at a local grocery store and picked up the essentials for an easy dinner: cheese, crackers, olives, nuts, fruit, chocolate, wine.
That first night I ate our adult lunchable-style dinner in the giant tub in the room doing everything in my power to think of absolutely nothing at all. And it worked for a minute. Until it just didn’t.

You know how you can get to a place where you’re so overwhelmed and exhausted that you just don’t know what to do anymore? That’s where I was, friend.

Luckily, Brian was in a much better headspace, and slowly as the hours moved on, he started asking me questions that I hadn’t thought of in a long time, but questions that we needed to address in a timely manner.

Because of my BRCA mutations, we needed to make some decisions about whether or not we would have another baby. We currently had Baby A plus our 3 biological babes, and Baby A had a brother. We knew that if it ever came to adoption, they would need to be adopted together.

Were we willing to do that? Go from a family of 5 to a family of 7 or potentially 8 if we decided to try for baby number 4?

That weekend we decided we wanted one more biological baby and the space for 2 more babies if it ever came to that.

But we talked about so much more than babies. We talked about life and our dreams and our business and the future. We talked about things that we just didn’t have the space or time to talk about in our normal everyday routines.

It was the first time we had ever really sat down and talked about what was next for us, what was on our hearts, and what we were dreaming about.

Brian told me he wanted to get his pilot’s license one day. I told him I wanted to write a book and maybe one day encourage women by speaking on a stage somewhere.

We didn’t dream up anything huge or uncover things we didn’t already know about each other, and we didn’t walk away from that weekend with any kind of plan to make those things happen.

We walked away with so many words out in the open air. We spoke aloud to each other our dreams, desires, fears, and hopes. We walked away with a clearer vision for our future and a clearer picture of each other.

Dreaming isn’t really all that hard. Honestly it’s pretty simple. But it takes intention, space, and time.

I had no clue then that one day one of our biggest dreams would be to create space for people to come dream, rest, heal, and grow, but one day, not too far removed from that 1st dreaming session we would do just that.

How’s your dreaming?

Are you dreaming at all?

Are you and your spouse dreaming together?

Maybe it’s time to get away and do a little dreaming….stay tuned. We may have just the space and place for you to do that this July.