keep dreamin'

Have you seen the movie Up? You know, the Pixar/Disney one with the little old man? I saw it a while ago, and I seem to be thinking of it a lot lately.

If you're not familiar with it, here's a synopisis of the first part of the movie from Wikipedia:

Young Carl Fredricksen is a shy, quiet boy who idolizes renowned explorer Charles F. Muntz. He is saddened to learn, however, that Muntz has been accused of fabricating the skeleton of a giant bird he had claimed to have discovered in Paradise Falls, South America. Muntz vows to return there to capture one alive. One day, Carl befriends an energetic and somewhat eccentric tomboy named Ellie, who is also a Muntz fan. She confides to Carl her desire to move her "clubhouse"—an abandoned house in the neighborhood—to a cliff overlooking Paradise Falls, making him promise to help her. Carl and Ellie eventually get married and grow old together in the restored house, working as a toy balloon vendor and a zookeeper, respectively. Unable to have children, they repeatedly pool their savings for a trip to Paradise Falls, but end up spending it on more pressing needs. An elderly Carl finally arranges for the trip, but Ellie suddenly becomes ill and dies, leaving him alone.

I think it was at this point in the movie where I was crying so hard that Hubby had to pause the film and console me before we could resume watching it. How children are expected to be able to cope with this movie is beyond me.

The reason that I've been thinking a lot about this movie is because we recently learned that we have to pay a large, unexpected expense. At first, we decided to do the "right" thing, and use the money that we had saved for our trip to Germany to pay said expense. I think I cried for a whole day when I realized that our trip to Germany would have to be delayed, or worse, cancelled. No lies, I was angry, overwhelmed, and beyond frustrated with life (as if that wasn't alreday apparent in my previous post). Then, the more Hubby and I talked about it, we realized that Germany was our "Paridise Falls". This is the trip that we've been pooling our savings for. The trip that we've promised ourselves we'd do. The trip that we'd been dreaming about for a couple years now.

If there's one lesson that we learned from this movie (don't kid yourself, there's ALWAYS a lesson buried in Disney movies) it's that we owe it to ourlseves to take this trip to Paridise Falls Germany when we had originally planned.  Not six months later, not one or two years later, but keep everything as we had originally planned and saved for.  My SIL is right; this trip is non-negotiable.  If we don't do this trip before we take the next step in life and become parents, we don't know when we'll have the chance to do it again.  I know it's something that we'll regret for a long, long, time if we keep postponing when "more pressing needs" get in the way because, let's face it, there's always something "more pressing" or "more responsble" to spend our savings on.  Thanks Carl and Ellie, for reminding us to not let life get in the way of our dreams.