After a banner fall of checking every single item off my seasonal to-do list, winter was decidedly less successful.  It was a busy season at work, which I don’t mind – I’d rather bank the hours now and have a cushion so I can take some time away from my desk in the summer months – but that led to more general tiredness, lack of motivation to go out and do all the things on the weekend, and less time for family fun.

• Take a snowy (hopefully) weekend getaway to the mountains.  Didn’t happen.
• Bake an olive oil citrus cake.  I put this on the list every year – this year, it’s happening!  Narrator: it didn’t.
• Take Peanut to her first movie in the theater.  There was nothing appealing.
• Make progress on cleaning out the basement.  Out of desperation, I’m calling this one partially done.  I did get through some purging in the basement and elsewhere in the house, and sent several items off to new homes through my Buy Nothing community, but I didn’t get as far as I’d hoped and I still have a very long way to go.
• Take the kids to play at Badlands.  Nope.
• Read some Dickens.  Nope.  I had Great Expectations in mind and that does seem like a good one for curling up on a snowy day, with a cup of tea and a roaring fire.  A few problems, though: (1) my fireplace is blocked by Steve’s gigantic TV; (2) snowy days are not relaxing anymore, thanks to two kids who are invariably home from school and climbing the walls; and (3) my library stack didn’t allow for much reading off my own shelves this season.
• See Huckleberry Finn’s Big River at the Adventure Theatre.  We did this!  I gave the tickets to Steve as a Christmas gift, and it was a lot of fun.  Mark Twain is his favorite author, and he loved the show.  Peanut is getting to be an old hand at the theatre and she was enchanted with the performance.  Nugget’s experience was a little less ideal.  It was his first live theatre performance and he enjoyed most of it, but as we crept up on the sixty minute mark he ran out of patience, and I had to carry him screaming out of the theatre.  Apologies to the cast and the other theatre-goers… he’ll get there.
• Go ice skating on the Empire State Plaza in Albany.  Oof.  We didn’t have time during our trip up north for the holidays, so I decided to change this goal to “go ice skating at the National Gallery ice rink.”  But then there was the government shutdown, and that ice rink was shuttered for over a month.  Then I changed the goal to “go ice skating at least once, somewhere” and that hasn’t happened either.  Which is a real bummer.
• Take Peanut to see Angelina Ballerina: The Musical in Gaithersburg.  Done!  This was a lot of fun.  We had lunch in an Italian restaurant and then saw the show together in late January.  Peanut is finally getting to the point where she’s a lot of fun to hang out with.  We really enjoyed ourselves.
• Complete a “vegan for 100 days” challenge.  Hmmmm – half done.  I was going strong for awhile, but I started making exceptions – first for good reasons, like fondue night at our friends Stephen and Nancy’s house, and then for less good reasons, and eventually I fizzled out.

So – not exactly a successful season, at least not by this measure.  But we’ve had fun family walks, read some good books, and baked a lot of bread, so I can’t say I’m unhappy with the way this winter has gone.  I could have done with fewer snow days and school delays, but what can you do?  It’s winter.