Vacation Reflections

Today is the last day of our 11 day long vacation from work. I had honestly under-estimated how badly I needed this time off and this time away from the daily grind. But now that it's coming to an end, I'm so NOT ready to go back to work. LOL.

Daniel and I originally took this time off with the intention of taking a few days for a road trip to Pennsylvania to explore Gettysburg and Amish country. We'd not taken an actual vacation all year, and Daniel and my Dad were supposed to visit Gettysburg this fall. But with Dad's death, that obviously didn't happen and I volunteered to go with Daniel to Gettysburg in Dad's stead.

But the closer we got to our time off, the less confident we felt about making that trip. Financially we're STILL recovering from the last year (paying to move my sister, the added expenses of my sister/nephew on our utilities, Dad's death and all the driving/moving/eating that went with that, putting down the new flooring in the house). And with me being pregnant and finances will only get more and more tight, we really didn't feel confident to take a road trip/vacation. Not to mention we hadn't done any Christmas shopping so were facing the financial pressures and stresses of the holiday gift giving season. So we agreed to cancel our road trip and to just enjoy a stay-cation.

The second reason we took this week off was because our Christmas Celebration calendar was insane this year. We had 11 Christmas gatherings this year. ELEVEN!! To help mitigate stress and allow us to (hopefully) actually be able to enjoy the holiday season, we needed to take the time off to prepare and have time to breathe in between events. And I have to say -- what a difference it makes to be on vacation with all these gathering responsibilities.

For the last five years, I've been sick every Christmas. In hindsight, I'm attributing it to the fact that I wasn't on vacation during Christmas and was rushing from gathering to gathering while working and getting minimal sleep.

This was the first year I successfully avoided getting sick for Christmas! It was glorious!

We were also able to attend 9 of the 11 gatherings and be prepared for all of them. If we had not taken vacation, we would only have been able to attend 5. Although I think next year we will need to curtail our attendance to ALL these events. It's just so much!

But Christmas gatherings aside, we were able to get some real REST. Which was amazing. And we were able to get some things done around the house. We got all the furniture out of the guest room. Daniel finally got all his work gear out of the guest room. We purchased paint to transform the guest room into the nursery, and starting the painting process.   But mainly, we were able to rest.

After a year of insanity, crisis after crisis, stress, emotion, and pregnancy --  having that time to rest was so desperately needed. Every other time we'd taken off of work this year was to manage a crisis. First my sister -- moving her from Upstate SC in with us. Then my Dad's death in May. I took off two days in July to emotionally decompress from Dad's death. Then I took a weekend off in October to go to a quilt retreat that ended up with me leaving early because the beds were SO BAD that it threw my back out and I had to go home. So yeah. Not much fun this year. Not any real time off this year.