I thought we’d get some time to relax after Christmas…and we have…sort of. We’ve had some time to play games together and the girls have really been enjoying all their Christmas gifts—oh, and today we built and decorated a birdhouse that’s been on the shelf since summer—but it’s been kind of stressful for me (and of course when I’m stressed out, it’s not all bubbles and cookies around these parts). I may not have had reasonable expectations as to how much time I’d need to recover from Christmas and visiting with family.
The biggest thing I’ve been struggling with is that it seems that nearly every activity includes some amount of complaining, fighting, disappointment, and/or crying. Soooo, maybe I’m not the only one that needs a recovery period. We sort of tumbled into Christmas break—recovering from being sick, finishing the crazy Nutcracker week, me back from a work trip—into a trip to Sacramento to visit my family and time around here with Sarah’s family. Now we’re floating in non-structured time on a sea of expectations.
It’s hard not to have expectations about what vacation should be: it should be fun, we should have lots of time together, we should enjoy said time together, we should get to sleep in, we should get out town, we should all be more relaxed and rested, and on and on and on. The reality is…something not quite like that…and I’m struggling with accepting this. Yes, there is some fun and maybe a little more down time. Maybe we can get out of town to the mountains for a day, but we really can’t afford to go away for a night or three. I miss the beach, a lot, but maybe that’s not in the cards. Air quality is shitty right now so there are actually large chunks of the day where we need stay inside.
Basically, this is life and I need to get over it—we all do. Tomorrow morning we’ll have a little family powwow and see if can regroup and figure out how to make the rest of this break a little more fun and relaxing for everyone. And I’m going to take an acceptance pill tonight and have a better day tomorrow.