I'm happy to say I was pretty productive during my 2+ weeks out of the office over the holidays, though in a very different way than last year. Last year I would have just returned from the FCS Championship in Frisco, TX with our football team and many of our executive staff after a whirlwind season, only to embark on the remainder of our basketball season planning, and hosting a national women's lacrosse championship. This year, I was basically off on December 18th - exactly 5 years from the day we settled on our house - and used nearly all of the time making that home a much better place.
"Spring cleaning" isn't really a thing for us since most of our busy times of year center around the academic calendar. Therefore, we need to utilize any time we have multiple days, or weeks, off from our typical chaotic schedules to get anything serious done. And our lives were in major need of organization on the home-front. Okay, okay, MY life was in major need. Hubs typically has it all together! But me and the kids were suffering from abundance anxiety. Yep, I just made that up. I realized that for months we were yelling at the kids to put away their things, when they had almost nowhere else to go with it. I was simply stuffing clothes that didn't fit deeper into the closet; I had all of our storage bins in the attic filled with baby clothes no one in our house needed anymore; and my dresser drawers never fully closed because there were always things falling behind them from being over-filled. Sad face....
So I had been reading the Happiness of Pursuit and the Art of Non-Conformity by Chris Guillabeau, and learning a lot about PLANNING for my life, for goodness sake! The irony is that I've spent nearly a year as the primary liaison of our department's strategic planning at work, only to realize I didn't have a strategic bone in my body! I have learned a lot through both ventures - the reading and the working - and now have a better grasp on what it takes to not just wing it in life :)
I set about cleaning the house the first weekend home, in order to better prepare for the pummeling of Christmas gifts that would soon commence. Then hubs and I enjoyed a movie and lunch date and a wrapping and coffee date. It's the little things. Then the kids were on break and we thought things would just get crazy, but to my surprise, Christmas Eve turned out to be one of the most relaxing days we've spent as a family of late! We watched a movie together, we wrapped gifts, we made a great dinner, we went to the gym.... and then we unwrapped Penguin jammies!!
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