I don’t even remember how to do this “vacation” thing

I sort of vaguely remember that years and years ago, we used to go away for Thanksgiving every year. 2002…. 2003 we stayed home but that was because we’d just gone up two months before for our second wedding reception… 2004 (AKA “The Year with the Best Snow”)… 2005 (AKA “The Year We Stopped and Saw Rock City) (and I don’t know why I can’t find my actual Thanksgiving 2005 photos on Flickr, hrm)… 2006 (where I apparently only took photos of my spinning? Where are the rest of my Thanksgiving pictures?!)…. 2007… 2008… and then came 2009. 2009 was really hard. Things at the yarn store were getting tight, Tim got laid off, Uncle Joe had that health scare. 2010 wasn’t much better, with Tim not able to find a job until late in the year, the closing of the yarn store, Uncle Joe’s health touch-and-go for the first part of the year. There were good things, don’t get me wrong, but it was still a struggle. 2011 was better, but both it and 2012 were financially tight enough that without help from family, well, it would have been a lot worse … but we still couldn’t justify the expense of kenneling dogs, renting a reliable car (the Saturn was reliable but didn’t have cruise control and Tim didn’t like to drive it long distances because of that), and hotels… we couldn’t justify a ten-day vacation so all those years – and I don’t regret this at all – we would go to Amy’s park or Amy would come up here, and we could do a small family Thanksgiving Day thing.

Now we’re going away again and I’m all, “how did we used to DO this? Why do I feel like there aren’t enough hours in the day for me to do ALL THE THINGS before we go?” I think I have come to the conclusion that I just don’t know how to relax, how to “let go” any more. Not on an absolute/total level. Part of me can, but part of me still goes a billion miles an hour. I grok that part of it is that during the time we traveled, I didn’t work at home like I do now. Sure, I thought about the yarn store in 2007 and 2008 while we traveled, but I didn’t have an immense checklist of things before and after going. My checklist was as follows: Decide on travel knitting; get yarn together for travel knitting; find crazy place to stop on way; make sure audio book is loaded; get vacation pajamas (morning coffee/breakfast time at their house is usually in pajamas, and that was a good excuse for me to buy a new pair every year).

SPEAKING OF PAJAMAS. This year I’m making a new pair of pajamas. Or I would if I could read instructions and made them pants LEGS instead of a skirt. Whoops. Hello, seam-ripper! I picked up this cloth at an amazing quilt store in West Virginia, and am making them to wear over Thanksgiving, so I think I shall dub these my “totally relaxed and laid-back mental and physical vacation jammy pants”. Everybody look at that cloth and think relaxed, laid-back thoughts, and maybe I’ll catch some of that energy and chill out when I’m wearing them and not worry about anything the entire time we’re gone.