Holding Still: christmas in ct, etc.

We had a really nice Christmas. Traveled to my parents' place and to the ILs. Christmas was spent with the celebrating Irish, the two days afterward with the reluctantly celebrating ILs. It went as well as could be expected, there were no sit-downs where all of my faults were enumerated and grievances aired. Phew! Oddly enough, L was extremely clingy while we were there. He's inordinately empathic, so he could have sensed my feelings of alienation while there. More likely, it was a new place, large and sparsely furnished, so he may have felt a bit insecure. H noted that the house was "spooky" and he thought he saw a ghost. My ILs have mentioned the presence of ghosts, so he may have had something there.

As we speak, the boys are staying with my parents until Thursday. I know, can you believe it? A very thoughtful Christmas gift to me and Alex, indeed. We are both working these three days, so it's good for them to have excitement and change instead of Alex trying to balance work and entertaining them when school is out. I'm teaching some vacation art classes at the museum where I used to work, which is good. I also just discovered that the recreation center and I received the grant for which we had applied in October. We didn't get the entire amount, but we did get most of it, so that's good news, too. I was missing those crazy kids! The funding we had depended on dried up, and I wasn't sure if I'd be working with them again.

I'm still meditating on and praying hard for us to move houses. We'll probably stay in the area for the next year or so, but a move upstate or out-of-state is a possibility. There is talk of us moving closer to my family, which surprisingly fills me with relief. I used to think distance improved our relationships, which maybe it did. But now that we have the two little guys, having them nearby for support sounds very good.

We will see. 2009 promises to be pretty interesting all around for us. I always figure that if we do our best, pick a good path, the right decisions will be made and the right things will happen for us. It might not seem so at first, but I'm hoping things will unfold that way. I have to admit I like the unknown. It's pretty exciting. Al doesn't feel exactly the same. In fact, he is filled a bit more with dread and anxiety. I am filled with dread and anxiety when I imagine having to stay in this house another year. In fact, the alienation I felt while at the ILs returned when we came back here. I may have done it to myself, or it could be the house rejecting me, who knows. Probably a bit of both. This property has a strange history within this family, and who knows about way-back-when, when the native population was ousted by the Europeans.

The boys did great with all the traveling and visiting. H had a bit of difficulty here and there, but nothing out of the ordinary. Just the usual off-the-wall behavior, teasing Lire too much, defying adults. But considering he was out of his element and a bit under the weather, he did great. Santa came to my parents' house and treated the boys well, but didn't spoil them. Nana and Poppie were equally generous, giving the boys gifts that required lots of assembly, which the boys LOVE. They like spending time putting things together. They did the first gift with Daddy, and then after we left they put the second one together with Nana and Poppie. The first is a Playmobil@ post office, the second a L@go interlocking gear thingie. They are also learning how to trace, how to connect the dots, how to make a slinky go downstairs, and reading many, many new books.

A very nice Christmas, indeed.