Ahhhhhhhhhhh.  All the kids are back to school today, and the house is empty for the first time in more than two weeks.  What a relief!  I love our children with all my heart, but when they are off from school for an extended break and I don’t get a regular dose of solitude, I find myself feeling scattered and forgetful.  It is during the kids’ time away from home that I regroup, do yoga, hit the trail, work on pet projects, take care of myself.  When they are here, I tend to neglect my own needs, and I can do that for only so long before I start to resent them for it.

The holidays were really good generally.  Not as over-the-top as usual (since I had pneumonia in the first half of December), but we did enough that they felt special.  By most standards, we did more than we should have (Was the Christmas Tea for the kids really necessary?  Did we have to have a New Year’s Tea as well?), but I am one of those parents making up for my own imperfect childhood.  So few people have a perfect childhood to look back on.  I don’t know if it is that childhood must be uncomfortable (how else would we learn?), or that from my parents’ generation onward there has been so much divorce and drama that most kids are impacted.

I have promised myself that I will sit down this week and actually write down goals for the year.  I always have a variety of projects going, but I often don’t have the discipline to sit down and plot out how to tackle everything that I want to accomplish in a given amount of time.  I will do it this time.  Maybe tomorrow . . .

Within an hour I need to be out on the trail (speedwalking).  The sunshine beckons.  After that, will I attack that stupid pile of mending that continues to grow?  It would be nice to whittle it down.  But “Clash of Kings” is also crying out to me.  Which will it be– book or mending?  I have to chuckle that this is what my life has become.  Oh, how the old Party Girl Heather would be shaking her head.  But that makes me smile, too. You can’t be a Party Girl forever . . .