Yesterday was supposed to be a ski day – long planned and the snow seemed perfect. The visibility however, was anything but. If you can imagine fog thick enough that you feel like you’re skiing through a milk-shake, that was it. Horrible – and for me at least, scary, because I get disoriented and can’t see what the snow under my skis is doing either and imagine I’m going to fall off the mountain or have a dreadful accident….

The upshot was that I got to have an unexpected afternoon at home. With teenagers ensconced in their rooms supposedly doing homework (mmmm, yes…) or tidying their rooms (even more unlikely). Whatever… It meant peace and quiet and a few unexpected hours for me. What bliss! I can hardly tell you how wonderful it was, without sounding like a complete saddo!

I had time to sit quietly and finish writing Christmas cards, time to sew a little on the Zippy Strippy bags and even time to bake Christmas Guetzli (Swiss Christmas biscuits) with my son.

At least half of these Mailanderli disappeared within ten minutes of them coming out of the oven – which I guess is a good sign. Today we need to bake some more – maybe Zimtsterne (Cinnamon stars) this time.

It was wonderful to have unplanned time and I could really see that doing less over Christmas is going to turn out to be the right decision. It’s quite scary what a huge sense of relief I feel at having cancelled a lot of our plans. Deep down I think I must have been dreading it, but couldn’t even admit it to myself. How sad is that?

Goal for 2010: Learn to recognize when I don’t want to do something and actually be brave enough to say NO and not feel guilty about it.

Phew, that feels like a breath of fresh air…

Have a good week,

Helen

This entry was posted on Monday, December 13th, 2010 at 2:50 pm and is filed under Thoughts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.