By Kelli Bowen
I have conversations with people: Hubby, friends I don’t get to see often, friends I do see often but don’t get to do fun things with, etc. We discuss how at this adult-adult stage, where we aren’t young-adults, but Imma cut you if I say I’m “middle-aged,” stage of life, it seems very difficult to make and stick with plans. My friend told me a better title for this post is “Everything Is #$%^&* So Don’t Bother Trying.” It seems slightly further over the negative line than I wanted to go, but it does kind of sum up my feelings…sometimes.
I give you the holidays:
We host. We enjoy hosting. Hubby sometimes acts like it’s all me driving this crazy train, but he enjoys tooting the horn as much as I do. Going into the holidays we had these plans: 1) Sister H and her family staying at our home 2) Hosting my big blended family Christmas Day 3) Hosting my in-laws the day after Christmas 4) Having a Friendsmas/New Year’s get together with friends.
Let’s watch this unravel shall we?
1&2. SoDak Sister almost bailed, but pulled it out so that they’d be coming up for Christmas: 30 hours. We get 30 hours of Christmas joy and then she’s off to the next holly jolly bunch of …..relatives. She, her Hubby, and their three kids would arrive during the day, stay at our house Christmas Eve night and then take off the afternoon of Christmas Day. Cool. On the morning of the 23rd of December, I get the call that her son has thrown up a couple times. We landed on if there are no other symptoms in the next 24 hours, Christmas is on. Fast forward a day and a half: they’re here, we’re playing games, having fun, food prepping for the next day. That night: youngest niece starts throwing up. Oldest niece is throwing up. Niece in the middle has an upset tummy. Sister H heads back down to SoDak with a puke bucket. We ventilate the house, bleach all shared surfaces, and shampoo the downstairs carpet. After setting some fans for drying, and putting the come-if-you-dare vibe out to the family, the non-stomach-bugged family shows up and we have a smaller Christmas.
3. Father-in-law and brother-in-law get the Covid. Sister-in-law has a baby 3 weeks early. Badda-bing-badda-boom everyone stay away from each other and keep your germy-germs to yourselves. In-law Christmas is currently scheduled for sometime in the near non-quarantine-future.
4. Trying to find a date that works for a decent number of friends, we landed on having a New Year’s Eve get-together. We lost some people to having plans already. (who ARE these fancy people who make plans more than a week ahead of time?) We lost two pods to one of the better-halves coming down with Covid, we lost two others to a mystery illness and nowhere to test to ensure it wasn’t Covid, one couple we lost to extreme cold, one had a sick kid, and two did the old non-committal-non-show-up.
In all of these scenarios, the day or evening didn’t turn out just as we had planned but we still had a great time. I mean, I didn’t open my gift from Santa or my stocking until Christmas night because my Christmas morning was filled with impromptu sanitizing, but it still turned out to be a good day.
Coming to a failed plan event at my house DOES mean you will be encouraged to eat way more, because I’ve been accused of having way too much food for events generally, so when half the guest list falls ill and can’t come, all attendees are instructed to “eat for three.” For New Year’s Eve, I believe it was “eat for five.”
Regardless the outcome, some of the best days or evenings are unplanned, so when our plans go sideways, we just try to roll with it. If it’s a plan that involved me cooking, I’ll probably roll out the door or into bed at the end of the day…because I will be eating for five.
Kelli makes her home in Cass County with her husband, two daughters (8 and 5) and two dogs. She works for a regional seed company by day and tries to be an alright mom, wife, friend and writer by night.
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