I make this mistake every single year.
“Can’t wait for those leisurely hours of Christmas vacation,” I tell myself in late November and early December, “I’ll finally have time to get around to all those niggling little things I don’t have time for in the pell-mell hell of daily life!”
I don’t know when I last had big stretches of leisure time during a Christmas vacation, but I surely haven’t had any since Molli Malou was a toddler — and that, amazingly, was a full eight Christmases ago already.
The niggling little things I deluded myself into thinking I’d have time for this year were heavily tilted toward things that directly impact this blog: year-end gathering and organization of photos, posting of a lovely end-of-year wrap up post including not only the last month or so of pictures but also looking back at the highlights of 2013, and the digitization of a lot of old, analog photos, slides, and movies that could then be shared here. (Also other stuff with no bear at all on this blog.)
Alas… ain’t gonna happen. We’re about to begin our New Year’s Eve festivities, will be up very late tonight, will hopefully sleep in a little tomorrow morning, and then there will just be time enough to get our lives together enough to jump back into regular life first thing Thursday morning.
I feel badly about that. And at the same time I don’t, because I think both Molli Malou and Maddie have had a wonderful vacation, and Trine and I have had some relaxing time together, and we have survived the holiday season in our awful, zippered, dehydrating house — and the basement is even getting a little warmer every day.
Plus, I did finally find a way to post movies of the girls and share them with everyone, even though I can no longer do so on this stupid computer. (Now I just need a little time to figure out how to post those movies here instead of on Facebook — which shouldn’t be hard at all, right? I mean, save the .mp4 file on my desktop, upload it to my website, and post a link in here, right? Right?) So it’s not like I’m not keeping their American relatives deprived of Molli and Maddie coverage.
So I’m dropping all the guilty feelings and throwing myself into 2014 with happy abandon.
Molli will have her first professional theatrical premiere and turn ten this year. Maddie will start school. Maddie! Trine will start working exclusively in Farum. I will attempt to go a full calendar year without getting fired. Hopefully we will have a lovely new middle of our house — new rooms, new floors, new walls, new bathroom! — and will be able to enjoy a visit from Nana and Pop-Pop — and, later in the year, maybe even cousin Sophie? There’s so much to look forward to — so I’ll wrap up the year in this blog with those anticipatory thoughts in mind and save the 2013 recollections for a post some quiet, snow-slowed weekend day in January.
Because of course I’ll have plenty of leisure time then.
Happy New Year!
