Best Laid Plans

Plans & schemes: they aft gang agley, you know.  So it was this year, with our Christmas Eve & Christmas plans. I wrote on Christmas Eve about how I was changing up a lifetime of tradition to play it closer to home this year.  We had reservations for a fancy, four-course dinner at the restaurant of a local winery, and then would see my mom, sister and other family on Christmas day.

Here are my two, all sparkly and festive at the restaurant:

Literal minutes after these photos were taken, it all fell apart. Lily ate her dinner, then laid down in the booth, crying real tears over a stomachache. Tucker too suddenly started whining, then crying.  We had the waitress box up our fancy desserts, paid and hustled out -- and none too soon, as Tucker promptly leaned over into the bushes near our car and threw up. (Very neatly, I might add. He was a pro, like an Ivy League college boy after too many pulls on his silver flask. )

At 8 and almost-11, I'd nearly forgotten how young children can get sick so very suddenly.  So that was Christmas Eve.

Christmas Day was...sad. I cried a lot in the early morning hours  (still didn't get to bed until 2am) and again later in the day, when it became evident that although Tucker enjoyed long stretches of feeling pretty good, we clearly couldn't be driving miles across the freeways to visit my family. 

It was still a good Christmas. There were screams of excitement & joy, and we were all together, safe, in our cozy home. Still, for all my interior scolding of how good 2012 was overall, and how lucky and blessed we are, I couldn't quite shake my blues. The missing-my-small-family blues. The crap-this-isn't-what-I-planned blues. The I-really-don't-want-frozen pizza-on-Christmas blues. (Luckily the husband hustled to the store & bought some chicken thighs and we threw together a decent meal. It wasn't tamales at my mom's, but it was good.)

Ah well.  Life.

Cut to New Year's Day. All better, and out and about in Nature, at a small preserve in nearby Fallbrook:

You'll understand if I feel a little hesitant about stating my resolutions and big plans for the new year. Before Christmas, I forgot that's always a sure-fire way to make God laugh. (Oh, who am I kidding? -- I'm always paranoid about making and stating my plans.)

My #1 plan for 2013 is to write more -- not necessarily blog more, but instead, get back into my Real Writing.  Back in 2011, I was making good progress and filling up yellow legal pages in longhand, writing a memoir.  Then things on the page started to get hard, around the same time that I resolved to write more here on the blog, and suddenly all my energies shifted online.  To force myself into writing more and being accountable, I've enrolled in a memoir writing retreat in Washington this March.  It's far away, and I  feel guilty enough about the airfare and the retreat costs to whip myself into a writing routine.

My other plan for the year is to be more physically active. I was terribly slothful last year, parked here in front of my monitor.  I'm not talking about workouts and Zumba and weight loss, really.  Just getting my arse in gear and walking the neighborhood a few days a week.  I'm getting too old to indulge in pecan pie and chocolates and cookies these past weeks and think I can magically will those 5, 8, 10 extra pounds to disappear. 

So that's about it: writing and walking.  And more of the same, I hope: reading, travel, nesting around the house, and some shopping for vintage treasures.

Oh, and blogging too, of course. I'm not promising to blog more -- just keep on keepin' on, showing up here 2 or 3 times a week.  And look, here's a picture of a heart-shaped hole we found on our nature walk:

 If heart-shaped shots in nature don't prove I'm a Real Blogger, then damn, I really don't know what I'm doing. 

See you next week, when my monkeys finally go back to school.