the dimple.

Ahhh how I love Noel's single dimple. I think this photo is a great showcase for it. I also think Noel looks like a beautiful little girl in this picture.

Hard to believe we are a week out from Christmas. A week out from our sojourn in upstate NY where it has been snowing like nobody's business, well except for maybe Minneapolis and Chicago. It's getting to be go time. The chaos and busy-ness will be peaking any day now and then.... nothingness. Hooray for January and bitter arctic blasts and nothingness. I hope Paudie is on board with nothingness because it feels so right to me. Weeks and weeks of nowhere to go and nothing to do. Clearly I am spent. This year has been a whirlwind between welcoming our gorgeous Noel into the fold, more travel than usual, and some increased intensity at work. Lately I have been very sort of absent-minded and forgetful and I can't help but wonder if that is just working mom-ness, closing in on 40 or some sort of preview of neurological issues to come (my mom was diagnosed with dementia in her early 60s). OMG, it sucks whatev it is. I am so type A, typically so on top of my game and lately, I feel like I have no game. Like I can't walk and chew gum. We'll see if it eases up as we embrace nothingness next month.

Paudie is getting so excited for our trip to NY and of course Santy. It's so fun to be living in a world negotiated and understood through the eyes of a three year old. I hope we have done right by him come Christmas AM - he changed his mind so many times about what he was asking Santa for - I'm so worried the toys are going to fall flat. I'm really wishing for a total AFV moment when he opens the crane he has been asking for since we got the Toys R Us toy book last month and goes totally bananas, jumping and screaming and doing a happy dance. Not that he has ever once done anything like that. Why? Because Paudie is his mother's son. Like if we were ever on Extreme Home Makeover the bus would move and I'd be all, 'wow, looks great. thanks.' Inside I might be screaming and crying but those emotions just don't make it outside of me very easily.

Trying to think... what else is going on? Feels like an increased incidence of bad things happening to good people. Really bad things, really good people. After Cian died, so many people told me, and perhaps I have written this before, that basically we have our cross to bear, we have our painful tragedy. And we'd be set. But I would never for a moment believe that. And recently this has been reinforced for me. Who knows, maybe we get passes all the time. A few years ago during a brief consulting stint at BCBS MA I was crossing in-between traffic to get coffee at Dunkin Donuts. All the cars were stopped. As I went to cross the second line of traffic I heard car brakes squealing increasingly loudly - a car was driving the wrong way (trying to get into Dunkins natch) and trying to avoid hitting me. I was frozen in fear for a second watching this car come at me. I couldn't even walk after the incident, my legs were so weak from the shock. I felt at that moment like, that could have been it. I could have just died getting an effing cup of DD coffee which probably tasted like shite anyways. But I didn't, I got a pass. I thought of that incident several times after Cian was diagnosed. Did I cosmically get a pass that I just don't understand? You don't know what you don't know, right?

So am I getting too heavy for a Friday at 4:30? BTW, I am so happy it is Friday at 4:30. Short week next week and a week off the following. Will try to get in one more post before Thursday - some more end of year reflecting might be in order.