Coming Out of the Holiday Vacation Fog...

I am slowly coming out of the delirious fog of having had 17 days at home with my girls (and sometimes even my husband!) for the holidays! The human service agency that I work for offers a wonderful amount of vacation, which I find goes quickly with time off for school events, sick children, miscellaneous small vacations... And every year I look forward to taking one large chunk of time off to be home with my family for the holidays. As I approach my year-end vacation, it seems so luxurious to have more than two weeks off in a row. It seems as though I will have enough time to get ready for the holidays, enjoy the company of my girls, do all of the projects that are piling up (I have sewing and painting projects galore over here!), and still have plenty of time to lounge around eating bon-bons! Of course, that is never really the case -- the time flies by much too quickly! The first part of my vacation was a mad dash of Christmas prep, travel prep, and Mom's car pool. The middle part, when we went to Long Island and got snowed in, was by far the "loungiest" (is that a word? Spell check says no...) and it was wonderful to have my little family in one place with no where to go, no one having to work, we even had an all-day jammie fest at Grammy's one day!

I went back to work last Monday (I am blessed to only work Mon - Thurs) and on Wednesday my nearly 10-year-old (what did she say the countdown was -- 12 days to her birthday?) was sent home sick from school with a stomach bug. Wednesday night into Thursday morning was delightful (sarcasm) and Thursday I stayed home with her to take care of her. She was home again on Friday and finally by Sunday we were able to venture out into the world! She was back at school today and I was back at work.

My husband was off today, and bless his heart he took both of our Christmas trees down -- finally! (I said that "finally" to my brother-in-law, who I was speaking to earlier, and he said "it's not so late" and I said, "they've been up since Thanksgiving weekend" oh, yeah, that's a long time!) So we are finally starting to get out of the holiday season over here and we're moving into birthday mode...

How do you shake off the vacation fog and get back into the swing of things?