You may have noticed that I haven’t done a lot of posting here over the last two weeks.
Over the holiday, I practiced the benign neglect…of my life.
Dishes went unwashed (not for an entire two weeks, mind you. In a family of six, the longest we can go is about a day, or people just stop eating or shovel food directly from the container into their mouths like animals). Floors went unswept. Bedtimes were ignored. Alarm clocks were turned off. Wake-up times were, some days, almost grossly late.
My kids ate all their Christmas stocking candy (and then when it was gone, scrounged around for leftover treats), laid around and read, played with their gifts and were basically a bunch of lazy slugs. Often none of us changed out of our pajamas at all until showering sounded like more fun than going any longer without a shower. Once I looked at my 11-year-old son and realized he’d been wearing the same shirt for three days.
We survived on Christmas leftovers, cereal, sandwiches, fruit and the occasional guilt-induced salad or steamed broccoli. We did a little traveling but mostly stayed home. My husband kept stealing my new Crabtree & Evelyn bathrobe, which is so ridiculously soft you feel like you could fall asleep instantly after putting it on. And then he’d fall asleep instantly after putting it on.
I got hardly any e-mail. I sent hardly any e-mail. I turned on my instant messenger, but most days there was nobody on so I didn’t do any chatting. I checked in with Twitter but barely engaged in any conversation. I mulled over a few ideas for new projects but didn’t do much work on any of them.
Of course, we had to make up for our sloth today by paying a little extra attention to restoring the house to its former glory…er, adequacy. And some work had to be done to get the kids ready for returning to school tomorrow (clean underwear and socks suddenly seemed a lot more necessary, and I realized I’d never bothered to see if they had any school notes that needed dealing with over the holiday. And there were the two-weeks-neglected lunchboxes to deal with…)
But basically, none of us accomplished anything for two weeks. And it was glorious.
How was your holiday? If it was as lazy as mine, I hope you’re not wasting your time feeling guilty about it. After all that sluggishness, who has the energy for regret?
This sounds like our house. We may have let our children run around in endless pj’s, but we managed to twitter!!
OMG — were you at *my* house this past week? With the exception of some company (my brother and his family, so it wasn’t really like “company”), we, too took the “hard relaxing” route… and loved every minute of it. Now that I’m “back,” I feel 100% rejuvenated and revitalized. Happy New Year to us.
I got my blog fired back up (and transferred from vox to privately hosted wordpress) and jumped into twitter with both feet. My kids were with their dad, so a lot of normal routine was straight in the toilet. DH got justifiably annoyed with me that I was on the computer so much. We agreed that future staycations need a little more planning so we’re doing stuff together occasionally have to leave the house so we’re motivated to shower LOL.
Loved this entry! I think a lot of mamas can relate.
Sounds like a great vacation-at-home.
We were on the road for two weeks, and I ignored all the stuff of life while we were gone. It was hard to come back to reality–laundry, bills, responsibility…
sounds totally like our house…i asked the kids if they had a good vacation and they said they did!
The biggest problem with sleeping in so late? It’s 1:30 AM and I’m not tired! (The alarm’s going off in about 6 hours…I’m so screwed!)
I love you! You lived exactly the same life I did over the last two weeks. I slept about a thousand hours and the 4 kids fended for themselves like foraging animals much of the time — it was great! And now I’m back writing at my computer and listening to the thrilling silence in my house. It’s all good.
Maureen, I love the mental image of your kids foraging for food like animals. It teaches them survival skills, I think.