I thought I was mostly done with Christmas shopping, but it turns out there’s quite a gap between ‘mostly’ and ‘actually’ and I still haven’t closed it after facing sunny & hectic Salamanca today.

Shopping was a bonus anyway, as the trip was mainly a bribe/reward to Raeli, who wanted to re-enact her wistful memories of the years when she and I went to Salamanca every Friday, to have babycinos with Toto (my dad), restock the shelves at the “dollie” shop (Artefacts, the artist’s co-op that stocks many of the Deepings Dolls) and visit her favourite bookshop, the Hobart Bookshop run by Chris and Janet, who hadn’t seen her for a long time.

We haven’t been doing that particular routine for most of this year, because I started driving and thus didn’t need to juggle lifts to make it to Salamanca, I could do the business part of it when she wasn’t around, and then the combination of my mother retiring from her dayjob and my advancing pregnancy meant she took over the restocking duties altogether.

I love the fact that Raeli is old enough to be nostalgic about something we haven’t done together for maybe ten months. She’s going to school full time next year, and I’m losing my Friday of having her at home. Admittedly those Fridays are often curses as much as blessings – we have been known to get dreadfully on each other’s nerves, and it’s a long time till the next day we have free of each other – but for the most part we hang out, do our own thing, and are at home to a slew of regular visitors who know that Friday’s not a work day for me.

Weirdly, I’m looking forward to January. Normally school holidays and indeed daycare holidays are a source of panic for me. I have SO MUCH TO DO, and a Raeli-free house makes so many things easier. I have a major book deadline on February 19, I think only about a week or so after school starts. But… for once I’m not desperately looking out for babysitting and daycare alternatives. I’m not even going to try to get ‘bridging’ daycare between New Year and the start of school. Once she leaves for Christmas, she’s gone. Oh sure, I’ll be happy to have the grandparents help out and take Raeli on excursions – and Jem is starting daycare of her own, a couple of afternoons a week, in January.

So much to do. Deadline. Maybe this is just another form of procrastination, Lintilla from Hitchhiker’s Guide breaking her arm to make her work more efficiently in compensation and all that, but I’m quite happy to have Raeli at home, getting a proper break, not having to hassle about uniforms and library books and getting out of the house at 8:30 every morning.

And yeah. Maybe if she’s home, and I have less time to work in, I might actually get this rewrite done efficiently instead of poking aimlessly at it. Like the way I’m currently working on a short story in between blogging, hurling dried noodles at one daughter, and breastfeeding/rocking to sleep the other.

Maybe I’ve just forgotten how distracting it is to have my girl home with me full time. Hmm. That one seems the most likely explanation…

Tags: mama writer, raeli