Christmas Do-Nothing

Merry Christmas to you, world of internets! I am partway through my card addressing stack and am working on considering making something ambitious like gingerbread or some cut-out cookies....I have most of my shopping squared away and I actually got the oil changed. I feel productive. I feel sane. Its Christmas-time and I feel sane. Because I feel good, I'm going to do less.

Tomorrow I am going to take the day off from Christmas and I will paint.

Its my own personal, self-care holiday gift-day to myself. I will shower. I will go to yoga. I will drink lots of water. I will meditate. I will paint. There will be many paintings. And if the boys want to paint, they can paint too. Anyone can paint! There can be paint all over us....that's allowed. At sundown, there will be baths....and before that there may just be a lot of underwear. We are all washable and we all need to create and breathe and fill our buckets, just as much as we need to do our math homework and catch up with the washing and finish all the Christmas cards.

There may be take-out for dinner. Merry Christmas. I plan to be merry, very. This is part of my prep.

Carpe Minutum!

Am feeling a little more in control of my life again at the moment which I realize is probably a passing fancy here, on the brink of The Holidays...but hey! Today I took the kids to their first theatrical production and left the baby for the first time...(He did great, my friend Nutmeg rocks!) and feeling thus emboldened...I decided to paint a little. There are such ugly risers on our stairs...potentially pretty but so scuffed and chipped and splotched with various colors that they are pretty uninspiring. Have been itching to paint them a nice gloss white for ages and ages. Why not now?!? Since dinner is in the crockpot, the kids are asleep and I don't have to dash out again for the afternoon doctor's appointment for another half an hour...I'm all over it. Ha! Feels so good!

Am trying to become an expert at carpe diem and even more realistically in my life carpe minutum...seize the minute. My life is a woven thatch of moments right now and so there are not often whole days but there are always moments. Must read more books and less reflexive facebook checking, must clean one little spot, sort one little box, lay out an outfit for one child and spend less time standing there wondering what I was doing, wishing I had more energy or lying in bed hitting snooze. There is a place in life for letting go and relaxing your mind and your frenetic To Do List but there's also a lot to be said for doing little things here and there to make your life more peaceful and happy and productive. Am ever inspired to do better with what I have....better than most people say I have any right to expect I can be. Thus we achieve...by trying.

Poetry Friday: A Poem About Inner Workings

 I am often asked how and sometimes why I do so much ("with three kids", they say incredulously!) besides just the laundry and the vacuuming...how is fuzzy...it's helter skelter, it's sometimes messy, it's creativity and prioritization and a million little invented systems to make it all work...but, why?

That's the poem for today.

Machinery Maintenance
I create, to keep my shiny, inner gears twirling.
The wild smudge of cyan on my brush tip
Is antidote to the angsty smear in my mind.
All these poems and paintings and frittatas
 I throw them tumbling madly from:
My hands, my soul, my brain, my very self.
If I stopped, I'm afraid the works would gum.
I would hate to see my interior hum,
Grind to a slow, pained, sticky glugg
The psychologist would put his ear
To my chest and furrow his brow
"Hmm...I'd say she's stalled. Still living,
But just kind of frozeny-glued up inside.
We see it all the time with these mothers.
I wouldn't worry.
She's good for another 40 years!"

To see other Poetry Friday participants in action, visit: The Poem Farm