Have you ever had one of those vacations where afterward, you felt you like you needed another vacation to recover from the first one? That was our holiday this year. In actual fact, I can't really say that it was all that stressful or tiring in the usual sense; we had our gifts pretty well organized and mostly wrapped before we packed our suitcases, and only had to do a few extra things once we got there. We were staying my sister-in-law's place, which now that I've been there a few times, I feel quite at home and I know where everything is -- plus she's just so wonderful to me, so it's not like I've got "in-law issues" to stress me out.
The kids were really pretty great; the older ones were very nice to their little brother and took time out to play with him more than they sometimes do when we're back here in Paris. The Little Guy was really good every morning and entertained himself usually until after 9am if he'd woken up earlier (and on several mornings he actually slept past 9am himself, which is very rare for him as he goes to bed by 9:30pm every night). So we got to sleep to a reasonable hour every day of our vacation. What's not to love about that?
The rentrée even went pretty smoothly, all things considered. It was hard on all of us having to get up at 7am again after more than two weeks of NOT doing that, and none of us are what you'd call "morning people". All things considered, the past three weeks were calm and relaxing, for the most part.
What did Georges and I do all this weekend, our first one with time on our own in over three weeks? Did we go out to a museum? No, didn't even occur to us. Walk the streets of Paris? Nope... too cold and snowy for that. See any great new movies? Well, Friday night we did catch the showing of "An American in Paris" at the Filmotheque in the 5th near G's office just to give ourselves a much needed "date night" out alone, but although we planned to go and see something like "Avatar" or "It's Complicated" or "Imaginarium", in the end we just didn't get it together (and this afternoon I had a headache anyway).
No, our weekend consisted of doing a mega-food shopping excursion yesterday to refill the fridge (the top shelf is still pretty empty though - yay!), after which G watched several episodes of The Twilight Zone (I got him the entire series on DVD for Christmas) and I watched Casablanca and played computer games; and today it was pretty much more of the same. We slept late. Made ourselves breakfast but snacked lightly instead of making lunch. Saturday Georges made a really excellent chili (his first time making it, and it's a hit!) which was perfect for such a cold, snowy day. We did exert ourselves Saturday morning to have a snowball fight with the two little boys next door (hilarious!) but that was about the extent of it.
Mostly, I think we just needed a weekend to veg out together. The older kids came and went as usual, occupied with friends, studies, Facebook or whatever. Georges is watching more Twilight Zone as I write this; I'm thrilled he is enjoying his gift so much. And when I'm done here, I may pop in a DVD of Raymond or Little House or Ally McBeal (yep, I've got 'em all).
It has felt great to just do nothing... and then rest afterward. It's been our way of recuperating from the vacation and enjoying the fact that for two whole days, no one has needed us to do much of anything.
My only regret was that we didn't ACTUALLY get to relax in a hammock; otherwise, it felt just as great as it looks in that picture up there.
