Quick Hitters

I. The State of the New Year's Resolutions
I love New Year's Resolutions. Every year on New Year's Day you have a beautiful blank canvas: 365 brand new, completely unspoiled days to work out what you want to do better than you did for the previous year. Here's how it's going so far.
1. Straighten out bedtime/rise-time schedules. This has been easy. I turn off my phone at 8 PM when we put the kids to bed and leave it downstairs on my desk. I'm asleep by 10 PM with no trouble whatsoever
2. Stay in regular correspondence with those family members who I wouldn't regularly see otherwise. Harder, especially since I can't text them after 8 PM anymore. But not everybody texts. And some people don't text, but like email. And some people prefer a letter impressed with a wax seal. (Sorry M, I owe you a letter.)
3. Save ---$---. Okay so far. No major expenses in January yet, but I know that our car insurance renews in February. (Blargh)
4. Add some yoga into my regular running routine so that my back isn't perpetually on the fritz. This has not worked out at all so far. Running is just so much more enjoyable that yoga...but MAN, is Owen getting heavy. And he really likes being held...and bouncing...and dancing.
5. Finish all Unread Books. I've been making solid progress on my big list of books that I own but haven't finished reading. Just since the first of the year, I've finished: Rabelais, Pericles, Prince of Tyre, In Dubious Battle, Polikushka, and A Tale of Two Cities. (Which I'd read before but didn't own. I ran out of books while traveling and had to buy a cheap copy of something.) Now on to Henry Esmond...

II. Folding Clothes
It's important to make things new again. And the best way to make something feel new again is give it a good cleaning. But when all of your clothes are clean and they still look like a wrinkly mess, you can make them all seem new again by folding them EXTREMELY meticulously and storing them in a pleasing-looking manner. This was a great game for the boys and I. I folded all of my undershirts to the tightest and neatest looking fold I could get and stacked them all perfectly atop one another in my laundry cube. The game was that they would be normal human boys while I attempted to neatly fold the laundry, and I would try to protect my work. They mostly won, but I will say that my clothes drawer (and all of J's, after I finished mine) look like department store shelves for the time.

III. DFW Airport
I was sitting in the terminal thumbing through a book and itching to get home to my family. I saw a little blonde boy with a bouncy step--the sort of step that you have when you're three years old and you know that you're about to take a ride on a REAL airplane--holding his mother's hand, backpack on pack. In his other hand was dangling something brown and very well-loved. It was a George. The George had no shirt, and had the same shapeless well-loved look of a certain other George that I know. I was happy for George and the boy, that they would get to ride the airplane together.

IV. Bad Back
Seriously, I might need to do some yoga soon. An hour of lying in bed in comfortable PJs with the mattress pad heated up and a glass of wine is not loosening anything up. Also, Owen might not get picked up very much tomorrow...