Six Days 'Til Christmas

We're on Day Four of sick Annie over here (so our jolly up-north Express Christmas weekend was not quite as jolly as we had hoped it would be, though it was still jolly nonetheless) and Day One of eleventy billion days off school.  The first time-out happened at 9:29 a.m.

Jemma is jack-rabbiting around the house like a jumping bean all day long, constantly asking and re-asking how many days until Christmas, until her birthday. She loves her new purple footie pajamas but they make her feet too hot so she wears them right up until bedtime, at which point she switches to her snowflake jammies, which do not make her feet too hot. When she sings Rudolph, she says, "had a berry shiny nose," and I wish she would always sing it that way.

Annie gingerly eats one bite of yogurt, one bite of toast, takes one sip of tea before lying back down in her bed. Her hair is a pile of mangled golden knots but I pet it anyway. She wishes aloud fervently that there would never be any more germs in the world, worries aloud hysterically that she will still be sick on Christmas, circles back time and again to why oh why it had to be her, sick, not able to play in the snow with her cousins.

There is a giant new box of Legos spilled across the bedroom floor, a pan of caramel cooling on the kitchen counter, an American Girl doll sitting in the chair across from me, fully dressed in riding clothes. There is a cookie exchange and a piano lesson and things to schedule into the new year.

I go to yoga tonight after dinner, kiss the girls good-night as Jason is reading to them in our bed, breathe my way through seventy-four minutes of movement. During the seventy-fifth minute, as we lie on our backs with our eyes closed in the warm room in the dark with Christmas lights twinkling at the ceiling, she says, "There is nothing for you to do right now. There is nowhere to go. There is no list. There is no phone. There is just you, and this mat, and this breath, and this room."

Tomorrow will be five days 'til Christmas.