When we look back at our lives, what do you think we will remember the most – the best of times or the worst of times?  I was looking through old blogs I had posted for my employees before the blog became public and I came across a posting that answered that question for me – in order to understand the answer you have to read the story I shared in April of 2011:

——–Last week I had some time off to spend with my family. We had a crazy experience on our trip where anything that could go wrong went wrong. I will try to share the cliff notes version with all of you: It started when we were loading the car to head to the airport. My husband weighted the bags to find that my son`s bag weighed 75 pounds!?! We opened his suitcase only to discover that he had packed the entire xbox gaming system with all the controllers and games in his suitcase! For the love! We almost missed our flight because we had to unpack and repack his bags, all the time listening to him say how close he was to making it on vacation with his xbox!

At the airport my daughter walked into a glass door and her brother who was walking obliviously behind her just about followed her into it.  Luckily she wasn’t injured.   When we picked up the rental car they had the wrong car reserved.  When we got to the hotel they had our room reservation wrong.   My husband then went to park the car in the hotel garage while we waited in the lobby and he ended up lost for over 30 minutes wandering around the parking garage looking for a hotel entrance door, so me and the kids ended up having to haul all of the bags ourselves to the room.  Up in our room the TV and the fan wouldn’t work.  When we went to leave the hotel parking garage, the key in the rental car broke off and the car alarm went off every time we opened the car door.  Then my husband ended up locking himself inside the car and he couldn’t open the door or the alarm would go off again – I was standing outside the car and tried to call his cell so we could communicate with him inside the car only to discover that he had forgotten his cell phone up in the hotel room.  We finally got him out of the car and went to the nearby mall to get dinner only to get lost in the mall while trying to find the restaurant.  When we finally found it and ordered our food, my husband looked down at his half eaten plate only to find that there was another person’s half eaten taco mixed in with his food (sick).  When we returned back to the hotel my husband realized he had left his credit card back at the restaurant – and all of this happened in the first 24 hours of the trip!  As the week went on my husband lost his wedding ring (for the third time now?) while swimming in the lagoon.    And the last day of the trip as we went to return the rental car, my husband realized that he had lost the rental car keys somewhere around the resort property so we spent hours searching for lost car keys.  Then my son ran into a fire hydrant on accident right in front of a tour bus where everyone inside was watching him (again, not paying attention to where he was walking) and hurt his knee.  And finally we missed the firework show our last night by literally twenty seconds.  Yes, our vacation was a comedy of errors and mishaps, but as my daughter posted on her Facebook page when we returned home:  “I WOULDN’T TRADE IT FOR A THING! 🙂 ”

The fact is that despite everything that went wrong on our trip we had a great time as a family just getting through the mishaps and laughing about them together.  We were reminded of the quote: “Life isn’t about avoiding the storms; It’s about learning to dance in the rain.”  And dance in the rain is exactly what we did last week and I am certain we will remember our trip for a very long time to come.

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So in answer to my opening question – I think it is often those worst of times that become our best of memories to look back at and laugh about…at least that memory of that trip is one the kids and I will remember and laugh about forever…I’m not so sure my husband Rollin is ready to laugh about it yet, but maybe after another five years he will be able to 🙂

Dance through life’s storms this week! Someday they’ll be your favorite memories.

~Amy