The boulder of seeming impossibilities has rolled. And it has all but flattened me in its wake.
During this exhausting past week, in addition to the usual holiday “cheer”, we have finally moved into our mostly finished downstairs bedrooms, becoming Task #1 of Seeming Impossibility. After five months of cramped living in little more than a construction site disguised as “chez nous”, we have expanded our horizons to include 55 extra square metres of space! We have a real house now! A sound vacuum to send our rambunctious kids into, called the downstairs.
And we use it frequently.
But it has not been all smooth sailing, as forecasted by our earlier flood. In spite of the five huge men – DH and four of his buddies (thanks to Werner, Philippe, José & Roland) serving as all-hands-on-deck for our move Sunday, it was a much bigger hassle than we expected. Even though we were only moving downstairs and therefore didn’t have to load up any truck or travel anywhere, we still had to fit furniture in like a puzzle. (i.e. Let’s first take this small fridge to the garage so we can bring the bigger one up, and then put the huge armoire in the kitchen, which clears the hallway so we can move the beds downstairs, et cetera). We still had to empty the contents of all the desks, dressers, armoires, and reload them on the other side. We still had to unmount and mount bunk beds, roll rugs, clean under the furniture, and sweep up the debris of forgotten objects into a laundry basket to be sorted at another time. Hopefully before our next move.
I’ve heard that the secret to a happy marriage is low expectations. I think that can be true for anything, including a move. If you’re uprooting house, you expect to be thrown into disarray for weeks and weeks. But when you move into your newly mostly finished bedrooms after months of disarray, you expect it to be a home right away. So part of the exhaustion stemmed from futile attempts chipping away at one pile, while staring at all the other piles yet to be conquered.
And on top of that, all this bustle happened to fall on Christmas week, which brings me to Task #2 of Seeming Impossibility – Christmas shopping.
Wading through the crowds the week of Christmas (when you hope that you’re the only one not working and at the mall) is like a salmon swimming upstream to spawn and die. Except that you’re engaged in an activity nowhere near as useful as spawning – you’re buying plastic toys that will get a short shelf life only to add to the overflowing landfills. Don’t get me wrong – I’m on the more moderate end of the environmentalist spectrum, but the Christmas debauch can turn the stomach of even the least sensible.
And then the grocery shopping! I mean, someone has to get the foie gras and seafood, smoked salmon and turkey, the bûches de noels … and it seems that it’s someone from each and every household in Ile de France. My maneuvering the enormously laden cart through the aisles of Carrefour in a desperate sprint to find cinnamon sticks resembled Fantasia’s hippopotamus dancing ballet to Ponchielli more closely than I’d care to admit.
We had only a short couple of hours while Young Lady and Young Knight were at the recreation centre to wrap all the presents, and this we accomplished through the deafening noise of workers drilling shutters into each of the bedroom window frames. We also danced attendance on Petit Prince, whisking away scissors before he could grasp them with his dimpled hands, and giving him his older siblings toys to suck on before they got wrapped (swearing him to secrecy as to the truth about Santa Claus), and we were just in time to fetch the children with only a mere three presents mislabeled.
The preparation leads to Task #3 of Seeming Impossibility – Christmas Eve dinner. It’s not a small matter to prepare a dinner for seven adults, six children (and two babies), but to prepare it with clutter still visible from our move, all three children home and underfoot (God bless ’em), the additional holiday decorating to finalize, and ZERO counter space does seem an impossibility. I resisted the urge to use the top of the garbage can as additional counter space. I was also, perhaps, a little overzealous with the meal planning since I wanted our expat friends to experience real french cuisine for their first Christmas in France.
We had three entrées (seafood pastry, mixed greens with cranberries and goat cheese, foie gras served with fig jam and toast) and the main meal (turkey stuffed with foie gras and figs, potato purée and white asparagus with orange sauce) followed by a cheese platter and choice of 4 bûches de noël. The remnants of this feast coupled with ZERO counter space created a terrifying mountain of dirty dishes that …. well, it made me want to cry. We are definitely redoing our kitchen as the next order of business, and it’s going to include a dishwasher!
In the end, Christmas was all that it is supposed to be. The Eve was a wonderful dinner with friends, blinking white lights, good food, pretty Christmas music, and children filled with the joy of being alive and the mighty anticipation of presents. The Day itself began with the long-awaited gift-opening frenzy, and culminated with a good, long dinner and time spent with extended family.
Though the boulder of seeming impossibilities moved on leaving behind pleasing reflections, it left my mortal body flat-out exhausted. I am a bit like the stretchy man toy that has been stretched to twice its length so that the plastic is almost see-through; the doll that has had her limbs pulled out by the naughty big brother. Now, if someone would come and roll me back up like a sardine can and stick me in bed for a couple of days with some Desperate Housewives dvd’s, I might get my juice back to continue.
But, alas, life (and kids) won’t wait for me.
* This post originally appeared in my former blog, Perfect Welcome, and may contain some modifications or discrepancies in the names or comments.
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