Happy 2015, and such
Jan. 5th, 2015 02:41 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
mamajoanHappy new year! I hope that everyone reading this, if anyone is still reading this, had a pleasant holiday season. We did, overall, but I'll get to that in a moment.
Last night I was reading through some of my old entries, as I often do. Someone on Facebook had asked about birthday parties for 3-year-olds, and I couldn't remember exactly what we did for those with my kids, so I came on here and clicked into my archive from around the time Isaac turned 3. I didn't find a post with details about his party (just a bunch of posts about getting ready for it, and then an "it's over, omg I'm so tired" post afterward), but I fell down the rabbit-hole and went on reading through my entries from that time period for a while.
Mind you, that was a particularly..."active" period in my life, with a lot of stuff going on: adjusting to life with two kids, coming back to work from maternity leave, looking for a new job, and dealing with some upset-tummy stuff that I didn't realize at the time was foreshadowing the eventual doom of my gall bladder. ;) But that's not the point. The point is that whenever I go back and read through my old posts -- wherein I often give extensively (some might say excessively) detailed descriptions of everything we did in a particular day -- I can't help thinking that my ten-years-from-now self is going to be upset to come back and not see those same kinds of entries from now. If the me with an 8- and 11-year-old enjoys rereading what I wrote about life with a 3-year-old and infant, won't the me with a 20- and 17-year-old (yikes) want to read about what my life was like when they were 8 and 11? That sentence was ugly. Please pretend it never happened.
Anyway, so the other night I thought "I'll make a resolution to post a "what we did today" every day for 2015." But obviously that's highly unrealistic, not least because it's already the fifth day of 2015. ;) So I think I'll aim for one post per week and see how that goes.
For starters, let me say a little bit about our winter vacation break that just ended.
I took more than two weeks off work, which I'm pretty sure is the largest amount of vacation time I've ever taken from work since the kids were born (not counting maternity leave). Back in September/October, I discovered that I had a huge number of "use 'em or lose 'em" vacation days, so I ended up taking off every Friday for the last three months of the year. I also took off the entire time that the kids were out of school, plus two days of xmas week when they had school. So the end result was that I had...seventeen days off work (counting the weekends and holidays)! Yow. And the kids were off for most of that time too, of course.
And unlike most vacation weeks, this time I didn't sign up the kids for any form of organized childcare during that whole time (I usually do the vacation-week program offered by their afterschool, or other similar programs in the area). So we really had nothing "planned" to do, except on the holiday days themselves. We spent the majority of those two weeks really just sitting around the house doing nothing much at all. The kids watched a lot of tv (actually Minecraft videos on youtube, but on the tv) and we played a lot of Mario Kart. It was nice...though after a while it started to get old.
Mind you, it's not like we didn't leave the house at all. ;) We went to a movie ("Annie") and Isaac played football with his friends on one occasion. That part was funny, actually -- Ruthie had gotten Isaac a new football for Xmas, which he loves, and so I emailed the parents who usually do a weekly-ish casual football game, and I said "Isaac has a new football so let's have a game this weekend" and several other parents replied that their sons had new footballs too. :)
We also went to grandma's house on xmas day, as per tradition; and on New Year's Eve we had a sleepover at my brother and sister-in-law's house. This was the second year in a row that we did that, so I'm calling it a tradition now. ;) As per tradition ;) we ordered pizza and watched a beloved movie of our childhood: last year it was "Batteries Not Included" and this year "Willow."
In between, on the Tuesday before New Year's, we went out to get Isaac a new winter coat, and met up with an internet friend whom I had known online for years but hadn't ever met in person before. She came with her three kids -- a 12-year-old and two teenagers -- and it was super fun to meet them. I took them on a brief walking tour of Harvard Yard and then we had dinner together.
So that was a pretty disjointed summary of our vacation, which IMO just goes to show that I do better with daily summaries than longer ones. ;)
Anyway, today we're all back to the grind: the kids in school, me at work. I got to the office after my 2.5 weeks off and was initially very confused by some subtle changes I noticed. For one thing, my own office was a lot cleaner than I remembered... ;) I vaguely recall doing some last-minute tidying up just before I left for the long vacation, but I didn't think I did that much! But the cleaning people didn't do it, so it must have been me. Also, in the employee kitchen, there's a new fridge, which opens the other way (handle on the left instead of the right) and that seriously freaked me out at first. I was in there getting my morning cup of tea and staring at the fridge like, "is it different or is my memory really that bad?" Fortunately a few coworkers came through and confirmed for me that it's a new fridge. Phew.
Obviously I could go on and on and on ;) but that's enough for one post. More to come.
Last night I was reading through some of my old entries, as I often do. Someone on Facebook had asked about birthday parties for 3-year-olds, and I couldn't remember exactly what we did for those with my kids, so I came on here and clicked into my archive from around the time Isaac turned 3. I didn't find a post with details about his party (just a bunch of posts about getting ready for it, and then an "it's over, omg I'm so tired" post afterward), but I fell down the rabbit-hole and went on reading through my entries from that time period for a while.
Mind you, that was a particularly..."active" period in my life, with a lot of stuff going on: adjusting to life with two kids, coming back to work from maternity leave, looking for a new job, and dealing with some upset-tummy stuff that I didn't realize at the time was foreshadowing the eventual doom of my gall bladder. ;) But that's not the point. The point is that whenever I go back and read through my old posts -- wherein I often give extensively (some might say excessively) detailed descriptions of everything we did in a particular day -- I can't help thinking that my ten-years-from-now self is going to be upset to come back and not see those same kinds of entries from now. If the me with an 8- and 11-year-old enjoys rereading what I wrote about life with a 3-year-old and infant, won't the me with a 20- and 17-year-old (yikes) want to read about what my life was like when they were 8 and 11? That sentence was ugly. Please pretend it never happened.
Anyway, so the other night I thought "I'll make a resolution to post a "what we did today" every day for 2015." But obviously that's highly unrealistic, not least because it's already the fifth day of 2015. ;) So I think I'll aim for one post per week and see how that goes.
For starters, let me say a little bit about our winter vacation break that just ended.
I took more than two weeks off work, which I'm pretty sure is the largest amount of vacation time I've ever taken from work since the kids were born (not counting maternity leave). Back in September/October, I discovered that I had a huge number of "use 'em or lose 'em" vacation days, so I ended up taking off every Friday for the last three months of the year. I also took off the entire time that the kids were out of school, plus two days of xmas week when they had school. So the end result was that I had...seventeen days off work (counting the weekends and holidays)! Yow. And the kids were off for most of that time too, of course.
And unlike most vacation weeks, this time I didn't sign up the kids for any form of organized childcare during that whole time (I usually do the vacation-week program offered by their afterschool, or other similar programs in the area). So we really had nothing "planned" to do, except on the holiday days themselves. We spent the majority of those two weeks really just sitting around the house doing nothing much at all. The kids watched a lot of tv (actually Minecraft videos on youtube, but on the tv) and we played a lot of Mario Kart. It was nice...though after a while it started to get old.
Mind you, it's not like we didn't leave the house at all. ;) We went to a movie ("Annie") and Isaac played football with his friends on one occasion. That part was funny, actually -- Ruthie had gotten Isaac a new football for Xmas, which he loves, and so I emailed the parents who usually do a weekly-ish casual football game, and I said "Isaac has a new football so let's have a game this weekend" and several other parents replied that their sons had new footballs too. :)
We also went to grandma's house on xmas day, as per tradition; and on New Year's Eve we had a sleepover at my brother and sister-in-law's house. This was the second year in a row that we did that, so I'm calling it a tradition now. ;) As per tradition ;) we ordered pizza and watched a beloved movie of our childhood: last year it was "Batteries Not Included" and this year "Willow."
In between, on the Tuesday before New Year's, we went out to get Isaac a new winter coat, and met up with an internet friend whom I had known online for years but hadn't ever met in person before. She came with her three kids -- a 12-year-old and two teenagers -- and it was super fun to meet them. I took them on a brief walking tour of Harvard Yard and then we had dinner together.
So that was a pretty disjointed summary of our vacation, which IMO just goes to show that I do better with daily summaries than longer ones. ;)
Anyway, today we're all back to the grind: the kids in school, me at work. I got to the office after my 2.5 weeks off and was initially very confused by some subtle changes I noticed. For one thing, my own office was a lot cleaner than I remembered... ;) I vaguely recall doing some last-minute tidying up just before I left for the long vacation, but I didn't think I did that much! But the cleaning people didn't do it, so it must have been me. Also, in the employee kitchen, there's a new fridge, which opens the other way (handle on the left instead of the right) and that seriously freaked me out at first. I was in there getting my morning cup of tea and staring at the fridge like, "is it different or is my memory really that bad?" Fortunately a few coworkers came through and confirmed for me that it's a new fridge. Phew.
Obviously I could go on and on and on ;) but that's enough for one post. More to come.
