Sundays always feel strangely hard. Too many choices, too much time stretching out in front of four people with competing goals. And the last Sunday of Christmas vacation? Egads, the pressure. But despite best efforts by the Babe and I to be at each other’s throats all day, we managed to contain our conflict (chiefly over the issues of Appropriate Sugar Consumption and Appropriate Winter Attire) to the morning. By lunch, all was good again. (My mother is laughing hysterically as she reads this, I know, to see my choice of the word “appropriate”, perhaps the adjective I most hated for its frequent use throughout my own childhood. What goes around, indeed.)
After a truly lazy morning at home (none of shed our pajamas until 11 or so) we bundled up (25 degrees here, yep) and headed off to our nearest tiny metropolis, Hudson, for lunch and a quick trip to our favorite wine store. (Holidays have a way of decimating our never-too-full-to-begin-with wine cellar.) The whole trip was delightful, enhanced by the knowledge that later in the afternoon, our wonderful friends from NYC would stop for a visit on the way home from their holiday in VT. In between, I managed to do laundry and clean out the mudroom closet.
If that last sentence is boring, reading way too much like “here’s what I had for lunch” (i.e., you, loyal readers, don’t care–and if you don’t believe me, read the book
I’m trying to do two things, and these are part of the plan. One, trying to give myself credit for what I do manage to get done, rather than obsessing (oh, and I do) about the stuff I don’t. I try to do our laundry (meaning mine and the H’s) on Sundays. I got his done, so brava for me. And the closet, well–I hate cleaning out closets, but lately, clutter is making me twitch. (It makes the H twitch more.) I had promised him, when he opened said closet , saw the hundreds of paper grocery bags, miscellaneous crap, and giant bag of overpriced prescription dog food for our (now dead) dog, and began to, yes, twitch, that I’d clean it out this week. That’s usually code for, I’ll clean it out…sometime. Maybe. But I had a few minutes, so I just did it. It took, literally, five minutes, and the charge I got out of it was absurdly out of proportion, so bully for me. Maybe I’ll tackle my bedroom closet, or Dido’s disaster of a bedroom, or…
And that picture up at the top? From a day this week where before noon, I managed to do a project with the kids (melting all their old broken crayons into the lovely new giant madeleine-shaped crayons you see above), bake gluten-free, sugar-free (really good) pumpkin bread, get us all dressed and clean the kitchen. Credit where credit is due, and all that.
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