What ever happened to all that NaBloPoMo gumption? It has fled with the late autumn. We are in deep freeze here. The windows are frosted over so that all I can see is a white haze where usually is visible the barn and the pasture and the dark shapes of the horses milling around the hay rack.

Welcome 2008.

Today.. ah today was a sweet, hard-earned respite from the eleven day onslaught that was Christmas break. There were moments of joy, moments of calm, moments of eh, and for the last two days moments of hell. Somehow we went from talking about repainting our kitchen to actually doing it. One minute Dex is filling in the cracks and dings in the old farmhouse wainscotting and trim (lots and lots of trim) and the next minute we have a full-scale home remodling project on our hands.

It looks fantastic, I must say. The darkish wood is now a slightly creamy white. The light walls are in the process of becoming a tasteful yellow. The whole room is so much brighter and open. So that’s all good.

What is not good is having to entertain, feed, distract four kids while not having full use of my kitchen and while being forbidden from stepping into said kitchen. For you folks in regular homes, what the latter means is not having access to (a) our main door to the outside world, (b) the only downstairs bathroom, (c) the laundry room & clean laundry, and (d) the fifty trillion bowls of snacks, sticks of cheese, cups of milk, and glasses of water required to keep my children alive for a given seven-hour stretch.

This is how I rang out the old year. This is how I rang in the new year.

Yesterday I was so desperate to do anything other than sit with the kids in the same two rooms that I made the Herculean effort to get them dressed and out the door - just to go for a drive since I can’t take all four much of anywhere by myself and anyway all the stores were closed, it being New Year’s Day. Because we have two staircases in our house, I was able to gather one or two kids at a time, herd them up the front stairs, down the hall, and down the back stairs into the kitchen. There we skirted the wet paint and drop cloths, shimmied into the pantry, wrestled into snow boots and jackets, and exited through the laundry room into the garage. Once I got those kids loaded, I went back in for the next set. Then I went back for all of my stuff, including a large travel mug of coffee. On about my fifth trip up, through, down and around, I said to Dex, “I feel like I’m in the Poseidon Adventure.” Shelley Winters hiliarity ensued. Five minutes into our drive, it was clear that the snow was falling harder and the roads were getting worse and that we had to turn around. I wanted to wail and gnash my teeth. I wanted to smack the steering wheel. I wanted to do anything but go home. But as I looked at the roads and reduced my speed to 23 mph, I thought of the four little beings strapped in behind me and was overwhelmed with the need to get them home safely. I mean, the roads weren’t that bad, just bad enough to make a drive for the hell of it not worth the risk.

All this to say that I was moving like a slug today. I wanted to post pictures. I wanted to frame more of my photos (which are due to the curator on Sunday). I wanted to stop at the grocery store for milk. But what I did instead was sit at the computer and finish my full and final edition of the WhirlyQ Family Next Steps Plan 2008.

The plan details our options in the face of some important, exciting, and long, long awaited changes that are maybe about to take place - if all goes well and the ogres don’t wake us from this sweet fairy princess dream. There are, based on what could maybe be about to happen, a couple of ways we could restructure our lives. Both* options require major changes. Which I am glad about. But they both have drawbacks. And I have thought about this so much and for so many months that I ache to be done with the thinking and to move on to the doing. Hence the plan.

I need to give the plan to Dex. It’s sitting here on my desk, brazenly announcing its presence with a highlighted, multi-colored handwritten title page. (Pretty sells, people.) And yet what to do? Wait until we have time in the evening? That’s farfetched. Wait until the weekend? Right, when all the kids are around. So do I leave it in his briefcase so he can read it on the train? Why does that make me feel like I’m planting a bomb? This is loaded stuff, life-altering decisions we need to make. And I just want to drop it in his lap and run.

It’s the same feeling I get when I give someone a manuscript of mine to read. I duck my head and turn away. I want to crawl off and hide under a very heavy desk. It makes no sense that I feel this way. There’s nothing in the plan we haven’t already talked about, at one point or another. But my nerves are jingly and on edge. This is a huge thing for us. Huge. And I don’t want it to explode in my face.

*The third option is to keep doing what we are doing, which is not actually an option. Nor do I want it to be. So don’t suggest it.