This weekend, we broke down and recycled nine metric tons of cardboard boxes which means that my office feels once again conducive to clear thinking and creativity. It is not, however, conducive to coming up with ideas for dinner. The segment of my brain reserved for storing meal ideas and lists of foods I have prepared and eaten in the past is strangely blank. 

Let’s not think about food and do a quick recap of the holiday break so far, Yikes/Yay style. 

YAY: My husband took the entire two-week break off, which means we are getting plenty of time together! We have started two new shows (Man on the Inside and Under the Bridge) and watched the first Lord of the Rings movie. 

YIKES: Y’all, I knew that Lord of the Rings was a trilogy, but I did not realize that – spoiler alert – NOTHING IS RESOLVED in the first movie. I wasted three hours of my life for… nothing??? A bunch of bro-ing out and special effects that have not aged well? Now my daughter wants to watch the NEXT movie and that is also three hours?! And now that I have endured the shock of the first movie, I am highly suspicious that movie 2 will also fail to complete the quest, which means I am really in for SIX MORE HOURS of Elijah Wood looking Terribly Concerned?  

YAY: One of the great things about my husband being off is that we have all sorts of plans for tackling lingering house projects. Paint the exercise room, finish the gallery wall in the basement, START the gallery wall (yes, my long awaited gallery wall!) in the upstairs, repair a shelf in the garage, replace the seal on the laundry room door, etc. etc.

YIKES: We have already used up half of our allotted time for these projects and we have managed only to procure paint samples for the exercise room.

YAY: We front-loaded the break with a ton of Fun Holiday Activities – a Christmas crafting session with a bunch of friends, a school event, a birthday party, TWO cookie-baking sessions, a visit to two of our old neighbors (and their dogs) – which felt happy and festive. 

YIKES: Carla caught some sort of awful bug at one of these events and spent last Monday vomiting and last Tuesday lying on the couch like a used, feverish dishrag. This meant that we had to cancel our Christmas Eve and Christmas Day plans with my parents, which made both days feel a little sad. Christmas Eve was especially anticlimactic, because we had nothing planned (except going to my parents’ house), and because Carla felt so rotten. I spent most of the day on the couch with her, watching TV and rubbing her legs and back.

YAY: Carla’s fever was low enough Wednesday for her to enjoy Christmas at full throttle. Also, I didn’t have to clean my house. Even though we didn’t have Christmas guests, we still made our traditional beef tenderloin, garlic and goat cheese mashed potatoes, and Caesar salad, which were all delicious. 

YIKES: Carla still had a low fever on Thursday, and had developed an awful cough, so we got her in to see the pediatrician who listened to her lungs and prescribed antibiotics for suspected mycoplasma pneumonia. 

YAY: ANTIBIOTICS.

YIKES: In addition to yummy Christmas leftovers, we have so many leftover cookies that every time I walk into the kitchen I end up snacking on something. I am starting to look and feel like a bag of mashed potatoes.  

YAY: Now that Carla is done with her course of antibiotics and seems to be on the mend, my parents are going to join us on New Year’s Day for some festivity and a makeup Christmas Eve (we haven’t exchanged gifts). I’m looking forward to spending time with them! I am also looking forward to eating bowls of my mother’s mulligatawny soup and coming up with some fun appetizers to make and stuff down my piehole.

YIKES: Since there are still presents under the tree, and also because my husband and daughter aren’t yet ready to say goodbye to the holiday, I haven’t de-Christmassed the house and it feels very cluttered and claustrophobic. And of course it is still Hanukkah, so the menorah is still out along with all its attendant wax drips. I am ITCHING to whisk everything back into storage.

YAY: It has been very warm (and wet, but we’re concentrating on the warm part) lately, so I have been able to walk outside without bundling up, which feels like such a treat in December. I think I’ll end this post and go do that now.