Year's End

Here at The Brooks Bunch, as in many households with children, the last big event of the year is the holiday vacation, since it only extends one day into the new year. Our kids started the vacation a day early, sort of, and they were not happy about it. Why? Well, that's an interesting story.

First, the last day of school before vacation is normally a day without a lot a school work, with parties and performances. To top it off, my kids had worked very hard making gifts for their teachers, including some tasty treats. And they never got to hand them out.

And to top it off, they had to do more school work than they would have had to do in school, thanks to something called a "Blizzard Bag." In order to reduce the number of days lost to weather, our school district has come up with some school work that the kids can do at home if there is a snow day. There are two days of work in the folder in the bag, and if some percentage of kids do the work, then the district does not have to make up that day at the end of the year.

I'm not sure how well this concept works yet, because it wasn't a fair test. The kids were very resentful of having to do work they would not have had to do at school, and so getting the work done was a nightmare (we insisted that it be done on the snow day; we didn't want it to slide into the vacation). Perhaps the second day will go better.

The rest of the vacation has gone better, though. We had a nice Christmas morning, and there was actually a little snow. We finished a Kindle edition of Danny's book Danny's Kitten, and we will have a book by Karen and the boys called Cooking Breakfast With Will and Dan ready before the vacation is done.

We got to go see a pretty good movie, Rise of the Guardians, and had an early New Year's Eve celebration at home (since Karen has to work New Year's Eve and New Year's Day).

The best part was having Karen home for seven days in a row, something that rarely happens.

Oh, and we actually did have a blizzard. A couple of days ago. I'm still cleaning up after some of it, but luckily no one in our household had to go anywhere when it hit, so we just stayed safe and sort of warm in our house.

And so the new year is upon us (since the world did not, in fact, come to an end on December 21st of this year). What will 2013 bring? Well, I can't be absolutely sure of anything, but I can make a few relatively safe predictions.

For one thing, I will be in a play this year, something that didn't happen in 2012. I will, near the end of the year, have a teenager in my house for the first time since early 2010 (and two by the end of 2015—yikes!). William will start middle school about six weeks before he reaches that frightening milestone, and will have to get up at least half an hour earlier, to meet a bus that comes more than an hour before Danny's bus. That's going to be all kinds of fun.

We will try to make some changes to our family life in 2013, which we started by creating some books with our boys and publishing one of them (perhaps two, by the end of the year). If we can keep some momentum going, with Karen's knowledge of crafts and art, and my explorations of the ins and outs of self-publishing in the Internet age, we might start earning some money at this.

And I can also predict that 2013 will be a year of ups and downs, easy times and hard times, and most of all lots of love at the Brooks house.

Happy New Year!