It’s that time of year again!
February 2, aka Groundhog Day, aka the halfway point of winter, aka time to give serious thought and shout out to what’s saving my life right now when midwinter blahs are doing their best to kill me.
{Also time to arm and fortify myself for the long dark ahead that is February-and-March.}
Long years of experience have taught me that I don’t like facing this time of year head-on. So that, and the fact that our firstborn baby is about to leave home forever, are why we are traveling practically nonstop until spring. Kind of a Jeddy’s-last-hurrah/save-Mom’s-sanity/let’s-take-advantage-of-the-fact-that-we-all-work-from-home kind of a mentality.
So what’s saving my life? Continually having a trip to look forward to.
Over Halloween we rented a luxury cabin for a work week in the gorgeous mountains. Then of course there was Thanksgiving and Christmas break.
A week and a half after New Year’s my brother Kevin’s family came to visit us.
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| Also Jason got a fancy new desk chair that came in the world’s biggest box, in which Caleb has now taken up residence. |
The day after they left, I took Jason for a surprise double overnight in an actual hobbit house for our anniversary.
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| Good food, a warm hearth, and all the comforts of home. |
The very next week we went to a beachfront condo with Nana and Grandpa for another away-from-home work week.
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| Caleb began his new science study on the art of construction. Here he’s building a tent to demonstrate compression and tension. |
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| Beachy watercolor. |
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| A lesson on why I-beams are so strong. |
Soon, very soon, it will be spring (winter?) break and we will be [Lord willing] cruising the eastern Caribbean in the sun—once more with Mickey, but this time just the six of us. A couple weeks after that, to help with the letdown of returning, I’m taking Ada and a friend for a girls’ overnight in a nearby city. A couple weeks after that, I get my Christmas present from Jason: an offseason work week in a huge, beautiful beachfront house. After that we’ll take a couple days off around Easter for a breath before the homestretch of exams, the final scramble, the year-end recital, and (!) graduation.
In other words, I’ve only left myself a few days to count down from one thing to another. And the anticipation of ever-changing scenery is what’s saving my life.
