Slowing it Down, Slowing it Way, Way Down

A few weeks ago I wrote a post about how fast our life was moving, and about how soon we were going to have to hit pause. Well, the time has come, and I’ve pulled the reigns way, way in baby. Unfortunately, of course, there is no way to actually hit the pause button on life (Lord knows I wish there was!), but I’m trying my darndest to do the next best thing.

I knew in my own mind that as soon as the Haiti Party was over our way-too-fast-pace was going to have to slow-way-waaaaaaaay-down. That (the Haiti Party) was the last “big thing” in a long stretch of “big things” on our calendar that spanned all the way from pre-Thanksgiving until now. Don’t get me wrong, we’ve got a lot on the calendar for the coming weeks, but we’ve got a little stretch right here and right now of a slightly toned-down-version of our “normal.” And so, on Sunday morning, with all of us in a hazy-blur-of-happy-from-the-Haiti-Party, it began: Mama’s demand for nothingness. And when Mama demands, the other four J-Ms have no choice but to do as they are told. And what they were told, in not so many words, was this: “We are doing nothing. For as long as humanly possible. And then, even after we stop doing nothing, we are doing very, very little for as long as we can.” So, yesterday none of us got out of our pajamas the entire day. We slept last night in the same pajamas we had slept in the night before. We snuggled in bed for hours, we lazed around doing who-knows-what, we watched movies and made popcorn, we drank coffee (2 of us) and hot chocolate loaded with fluff (3 of us), we watched the birds at our birdfeeder, we ate whatever we could scavenge from the fridge, we did “nothing” (i.e., everything). Owen had a bad cold and was running a fever – which, in a strangely ironic way – only helped our plight: Owen sick is Owen slower (and the only way that he’s ever slower). His fever broke in the night and he woke up feeling like himself again (and while we were slightly taken aback to be dealing with him at full-throttle again so soon, we, of course, wouldn’t trade our super-charged boy for the world, and were happy to see him bounce back so quickly).

Today was another day at home. We left only to go out to lunch and to the grocery store. And it was another day with Mama at the reigns, pulling them way, way in, saying “whooooooa there. slow it down there. take it down a whole bunch of notches.” And so there were airports built in the playroom, and sword fights in the basement, and elaborate picnics made for dolls on the floor of the kitchen. There were shows performed, indoor-jump-roping-records-beat, and there was dancing to all sorts of genres of music. There was a “Fancy Nancy Fancy Tea Party” that lasted a good long while:

And there was Play-Doh for another good long while too:

And my goal for the next couple of weeks is to try to keep it right where its at here: slow and steady for as long as we can possibly sustain it. Because we’ve had a lot going on. For far too long. I’d like to try to use this “down time” to blog about some of the highlights of our past few months in the next few days. Things that have happened over the past slew of weeks that have kept us going at full-tilt for a far-too-long-stretch-of-time… such as…  our decision to move them, and the boys’ massive transition, from our old Waldorf school to our new Friends school; our decision to let go of our nanny for the past two years, Margie, and our re-acclimation to life without her; Meera’s start at her very own “school” (i.e. daycare) – so huge for her and for all five of us; and our purchase of a… get this… prepare yourself for the shock of it people (I, personally, am still in a state of utter shock over it): none other than, oh yes, believe it or not, a minivan. Oh, and believe me, there have been about a gazillion other things that have gone on, thrown in there, all betwixed and between the big-ticket-items of our past few months. And so, for the (hopefully) final phase of winter, my goal is to hunker down and try to reap the only real benefit I can see in the dead-of-winter-February-funk—  that is, the chance to be part of the stillness and dullness and lack-of-excitement-in-the-landscape, the opportunity to embrace the nothing-ness (but everything-ness) of it, and the challenge to try to hibernate in it a bit. And so I’ll be shooting for a fire in the fireplace (or two), a lamb stew (or two), more soft old quilts snuggled tight around five bodies in this house of ours, and a slower version of myself at the helm of this family.  This is our chance, and I don’t want to blow it. The chance to do nothing together. The chance to ‘hit pause’ as best we can – knowing that we can’t really hit pause, but knowing too that we can really savor where we’ve gotten ourselves to through this frenzy that has been our past few weeks.