Weathering storms
Nov. 24th, 2024 01:24 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
liv10 years (and one month) ago some friends of ours, themselves a married couple, asked me and jack out. At the time we had no clear expectations for what 'going out' was going to mean, but we fell in love very intensely and rapidly and were thinking long term thoughts probably sooner than would be standard. Though there isn't really any 'standard' for a couple dating another couple.
A few months later our OSOs went to Legoland for their 10th wedding anniversary, and we sort of joked that maybe when the quad reached ten years we should follow the same tradition. So this year we have in fact been together for ten years, and we did in fact go to Legoland.
I suppose you expect that in a decade of relationship lots of big life changes are going to happen! I was in the process of slowly extracting myself from academia when we got together, and changed career again from alt-ac (2017-23) to retraining as a rabbi. Fairly early onghoti_mhic_uait got together with another long-term partner, and they gradually shifted to a co-parenting relationship. Around 2020 the eldest moved out as he had completed university, and the youngest was born in the summer. We were long distance for the first three years due to my working in a university the other side of the country and weekly commuting, then really close neighbours for a bit under 5 years in the middle, then OSOs moved out to a big house in the countryside with space for three adults and three kids, so then we were 10 miles apart instead of in and out of each others' houses, and now I live in London half the time, so we're a bit long-distance ish again. So new metamour, new offspring, and some evolving dynamics of the permutations of subgroups within the original quad.
In 2015-16, around the Brexit vote, we seriously considered moving to Ireland to be able to retain our European citizenship and get out of a context where the far right were emboldened in ways I found, and continue to find, scary. We articulated being sufficiently committed to each other for an international move. But in the end we just couldn't achieve escape velocity, partly because I didn't manage to find a job, and partly because the children were of an age where they had strong educational and social ties in the Cambridge area.
And plague. Basically half of our ten year relationship has taken place during Covid times. A few months in 2020 when we stayed strictly 2m apart and only met up outdoors (including when G was a newborn and couldn't focus on people standing 2m away). Then the government made "bubbles" for households with children under 1, so we were each others' only in person contacts for a big chunk of 2020 through 21. And we had many, long, agonized discussions about balancing Covid safety with important priorities like the children's education and relationships with grandparents, and our own social needs.
Anyway. We made it to ten years and still going strong. I got massive cold feet about the Legoland trip because this year has had a lot of unexpected expenses related to the flat and I am in the middle of my long stint of not earning. And because of Covid; I massively regret attending Worldcon this summer because I got Covid, and I really don't want to make the same mistake again. But then again, a theme park is mostly outdoors, so it's probably a lower risk anniversary event than lots of things we might do. In the end, lovelyghoti_mhic_uait talked me back into it, and also used her organizing superpowers to plan the trip down to all the logistics, including getting some awesome deals so that we had a whole day including accommodation for 6 of us for not much over £300.
For lots of reasons over and above plague, we couldn't make it to Denmark again this time. And we couldn't go on our actual anniversary because ofcjwatson's bar mitzvah and work commitments. So we went to Windsor at the end of the month instead, and I agree with ghoti_mhic_uait that the UK version is definitely inferior, but still a really lovely day out. We stayed in a cabin in the Woodland Village, which could fit six of us in one space, and just provides everything you want from actually staying in a Lego-themed apartment. It was so exciting to walk past all the little Lego sculptures and thoughtfully provided play spaces, and to find the Lego decorations and keeper Lego sets and bucket of misc bricks in the room! In order to have something to do when we arrived on Friday evening (the park is only open weekends off season), we played Lego-themed Minigolf, which was cute, though probably only worth it because it was included in the package deal.
jack decided he preferred a spa day on his own over a theme park trip, and 16yo S had got double-booked and had tickets for a show on Saturday. So it wasn't quite as I imagined our ten year anniversary, but it was still extremely lovely! We got to bring the teenager for the evening and stay together in the exciting themed cabin. Another thing I hadn't entirely factored in was that Storm Bert hit London sometime in the night; this led to the temperature being more than 10° warmer on Saturday than the previous few days of cold snap, but it was also very blustery and rainy. Many of the park attractions were closed from a combination of weather conditions and switching over to Christmas season. But there was still plenty to do for a day. And the Christmas stuff was mostly cute and not over-intrusive.
The stand-out ride we did manage to go on was Flight of the Sky Lion, which is a VR ride that almost completely convinced me that I was swooping through the air and plunging off cliffs and into caverns. We didn't entirely know what to expect and it turned out to be exciting in a totally different way from what I imagined. I was expecting basically a rollercoaster with some light displays, but actually most of the movement was illusory. Very convincing illusion though; the only thing that saved me from terror at some of the (fake) vertical plunges was that I could see that some of the projected images were a bit pixelly. If the technical quality improves at all I will find it almost as scary as a real coaster! (I'm a wimp about rollercoasters. I enjoy the ones aimed at children or the ones serious aficionados would scorn, but not the big famous thrill rides.)
The park being partially closed made it a bit tame for 12yo A, but I think he still enjoyed the day, maybe not as much as the superior theme park he visited aged 6, but still. And 4yo G had a totally awesome time; she's just tall enough for most of the child-friendly rides, and she has a very good sense of what she will enjoy versus what would be too fast for her, and she really enjoyed looking at all the cool Lego sculptures and playing with the Lego provided in the cabin and the restaurant. Also she's astonishingly patient; even when she was cold, wet and hungry, and had been trailing round the park on foot for hours, at a stage when I would expect kids that age to completely lose it, she barely even complained, let alone got seriously upset. She occasionally asked very politely to be carried, that was about the extent of expressing unhappiness. It's so weird to be around a very young child with that level of emotional regulation, but she's always been like this.
The food situation was not ideal. The weather was just too unpleasant to contemplate eating outdoors, which is not that surprising in late November, but obviously having to be indoors to eat greatly increased the risk of the day. Also theme parks basically always have over-priced, not great quality fast food. (Danish Legoland being the rare exception to this.) Also, the restaurant attached to the Woodland village area was the only one that was fully Lego themed and provided giant Lego fountains. That's the big downside of UK Legoland compared to Denmark: in most of the park, you can't really play with Lego while also going on Lego-themed rides or admiring Lego sculptures. They don't provide little Lego buckets to keep kids amused while queuing; they suggested downloading the park's app, but realistically if you're going to play on your phone you are probably just going to play on your phone. It's not the same. If it just had a slightly less good selection of rides I wouldn't say it was especially worse, but it's more like a generic theme park that happens to have Lego themed decor, than actually being a land of Lego.
Anyway. The short version is that I had an awesome time with my loves and I feel extremely fortunate.
jack out. At the time we had no clear expectations for what 'going out' was going to mean, but we fell in love very intensely and rapidly and were thinking long term thoughts probably sooner than would be standard. Though there isn't really any 'standard' for a couple dating another couple. A few months later our OSOs went to Legoland for their 10th wedding anniversary, and we sort of joked that maybe when the quad reached ten years we should follow the same tradition. So this year we have in fact been together for ten years, and we did in fact go to Legoland.
I suppose you expect that in a decade of relationship lots of big life changes are going to happen! I was in the process of slowly extracting myself from academia when we got together, and changed career again from alt-ac (2017-23) to retraining as a rabbi. Fairly early on
ghoti_mhic_uait got together with another long-term partner, and they gradually shifted to a co-parenting relationship. Around 2020 the eldest moved out as he had completed university, and the youngest was born in the summer. We were long distance for the first three years due to my working in a university the other side of the country and weekly commuting, then really close neighbours for a bit under 5 years in the middle, then OSOs moved out to a big house in the countryside with space for three adults and three kids, so then we were 10 miles apart instead of in and out of each others' houses, and now I live in London half the time, so we're a bit long-distance ish again. So new metamour, new offspring, and some evolving dynamics of the permutations of subgroups within the original quad. In 2015-16, around the Brexit vote, we seriously considered moving to Ireland to be able to retain our European citizenship and get out of a context where the far right were emboldened in ways I found, and continue to find, scary. We articulated being sufficiently committed to each other for an international move. But in the end we just couldn't achieve escape velocity, partly because I didn't manage to find a job, and partly because the children were of an age where they had strong educational and social ties in the Cambridge area.
And plague. Basically half of our ten year relationship has taken place during Covid times. A few months in 2020 when we stayed strictly 2m apart and only met up outdoors (including when G was a newborn and couldn't focus on people standing 2m away). Then the government made "bubbles" for households with children under 1, so we were each others' only in person contacts for a big chunk of 2020 through 21. And we had many, long, agonized discussions about balancing Covid safety with important priorities like the children's education and relationships with grandparents, and our own social needs.
Anyway. We made it to ten years and still going strong. I got massive cold feet about the Legoland trip because this year has had a lot of unexpected expenses related to the flat and I am in the middle of my long stint of not earning. And because of Covid; I massively regret attending Worldcon this summer because I got Covid, and I really don't want to make the same mistake again. But then again, a theme park is mostly outdoors, so it's probably a lower risk anniversary event than lots of things we might do. In the end, lovely
ghoti_mhic_uait talked me back into it, and also used her organizing superpowers to plan the trip down to all the logistics, including getting some awesome deals so that we had a whole day including accommodation for 6 of us for not much over £300.For lots of reasons over and above plague, we couldn't make it to Denmark again this time. And we couldn't go on our actual anniversary because of
cjwatson's bar mitzvah and work commitments. So we went to Windsor at the end of the month instead, and I agree with ghoti_mhic_uait that the UK version is definitely inferior, but still a really lovely day out. We stayed in a cabin in the Woodland Village, which could fit six of us in one space, and just provides everything you want from actually staying in a Lego-themed apartment. It was so exciting to walk past all the little Lego sculptures and thoughtfully provided play spaces, and to find the Lego decorations and keeper Lego sets and bucket of misc bricks in the room! In order to have something to do when we arrived on Friday evening (the park is only open weekends off season), we played Lego-themed Minigolf, which was cute, though probably only worth it because it was included in the package deal. jack decided he preferred a spa day on his own over a theme park trip, and 16yo S had got double-booked and had tickets for a show on Saturday. So it wasn't quite as I imagined our ten year anniversary, but it was still extremely lovely! We got to bring the teenager for the evening and stay together in the exciting themed cabin. Another thing I hadn't entirely factored in was that Storm Bert hit London sometime in the night; this led to the temperature being more than 10° warmer on Saturday than the previous few days of cold snap, but it was also very blustery and rainy. Many of the park attractions were closed from a combination of weather conditions and switching over to Christmas season. But there was still plenty to do for a day. And the Christmas stuff was mostly cute and not over-intrusive. The stand-out ride we did manage to go on was Flight of the Sky Lion, which is a VR ride that almost completely convinced me that I was swooping through the air and plunging off cliffs and into caverns. We didn't entirely know what to expect and it turned out to be exciting in a totally different way from what I imagined. I was expecting basically a rollercoaster with some light displays, but actually most of the movement was illusory. Very convincing illusion though; the only thing that saved me from terror at some of the (fake) vertical plunges was that I could see that some of the projected images were a bit pixelly. If the technical quality improves at all I will find it almost as scary as a real coaster! (I'm a wimp about rollercoasters. I enjoy the ones aimed at children or the ones serious aficionados would scorn, but not the big famous thrill rides.)
The park being partially closed made it a bit tame for 12yo A, but I think he still enjoyed the day, maybe not as much as the superior theme park he visited aged 6, but still. And 4yo G had a totally awesome time; she's just tall enough for most of the child-friendly rides, and she has a very good sense of what she will enjoy versus what would be too fast for her, and she really enjoyed looking at all the cool Lego sculptures and playing with the Lego provided in the cabin and the restaurant. Also she's astonishingly patient; even when she was cold, wet and hungry, and had been trailing round the park on foot for hours, at a stage when I would expect kids that age to completely lose it, she barely even complained, let alone got seriously upset. She occasionally asked very politely to be carried, that was about the extent of expressing unhappiness. It's so weird to be around a very young child with that level of emotional regulation, but she's always been like this.
The food situation was not ideal. The weather was just too unpleasant to contemplate eating outdoors, which is not that surprising in late November, but obviously having to be indoors to eat greatly increased the risk of the day. Also theme parks basically always have over-priced, not great quality fast food. (Danish Legoland being the rare exception to this.) Also, the restaurant attached to the Woodland village area was the only one that was fully Lego themed and provided giant Lego fountains. That's the big downside of UK Legoland compared to Denmark: in most of the park, you can't really play with Lego while also going on Lego-themed rides or admiring Lego sculptures. They don't provide little Lego buckets to keep kids amused while queuing; they suggested downloading the park's app, but realistically if you're going to play on your phone you are probably just going to play on your phone. It's not the same. If it just had a slightly less good selection of rides I wouldn't say it was especially worse, but it's more like a generic theme park that happens to have Lego themed decor, than actually being a land of Lego.
Anyway. The short version is that I had an awesome time with my loves and I feel extremely fortunate.
(no subject)
Date: 2024-11-24 03:41 pm (UTC)Congratulations on ten years!
(no subject)
Date: 2024-11-24 03:44 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2024-11-24 07:57 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2024-11-24 09:06 pm (UTC)I am really impressed at how much you all managed. What nearly does me in about polyamory is not any of the things I thought might, but just the horrors of scheduling.
P.
(no subject)
Date: 2024-11-24 10:20 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2024-11-24 09:01 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2024-11-25 08:04 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2024-11-25 10:43 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2024-11-25 03:16 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2024-11-25 06:17 pm (UTC)It sounds like UK Legoland UK needs a lot more Lego in it to go along with the aesthetics.
(no subject)
Date: 2024-11-25 06:35 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2024-11-26 10:15 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2024-11-26 07:01 pm (UTC)