31 December, 2009

2009 ends with teenager sleep

We were talking yesterday about how jam-packed 2009 has been and that it didn't leave us where we thought we'd be. And try as we have, we still can't remember what we did for Stu's last birthday. I remember it being a Tuesday because he had to get a sub for a yoga class, but that is it...anybody remember?

Anyway, January was Obama's inauguration, the weekend of my birthday and notably the coldest DC had been for a while (something like 22F over the weekend.) We watched it from the warmth and spaciousness of our sofa. It was February (also the elusive birthday plans) that we put our tiny DC condo on the market because we randomly popped into an open house on Monroe St. and fell in love with a 1900 rowhouse with 4 (FOUR) fireplaces. It was March that we found out about Stu getting accepted to the Stockholm School of Economics, April that we decided for sure that it was too good an opportunity to pass up, May that I got laid off (with severance and unemployment and an extra 2 months to pack up for the trip.) In June, Stu taught his final yoga class, and in July we said goodbye to our belongings and put them on a boat destined for Stockholm (okay, so they ended up in Gothenburg and I had to finagle customs clearance and delivery to Stockholm.) We arrived in August and spent nearly 3 weeks just hanging out in our new city before Stu started school, I got accepted to the Curating Art program at Stockholm University and started working as a nanny. You kind of get what we've been doing since then in this blog.

So now we're in Sweden until at least 2011. Its December, and we experience daily far colder temps than that inauguration weekend nearly a year ago. And its the longest I have been without some type of job since I started working at Ruby Tuesday when i was 16.

I am not kidding about the job thing...it is kind of amazing. It has led to what Stu and I call teenager sleep. School ended for the year on the 18th, and we have been regularly getting 10-11 hours of sleep each night. I actually don't think I ever slept this much, even AS a teenager! Most embarrassing, we slept until after 11am when Stu's mama was here last week...we get *at most* 5 hours of light-outside time to do things now, and we slept a good chunk of that day away!
And when we do get up, we laze about for an hour or so, catching up on the internets, drinking an entire pot of coffee. In fact, its 10:53am as I type this, and Stu is still in bed. I am not mentioning teenager sleep to make anyone with full-time jobs or kids jealous. But to point out that we didn't expect a year ago to be able to spend several weeks straight sleeping until whenever we wanted to, staying up as late as we wanted to, doing whatever we wanted to, or doing nothing at all. And in a few years, we'll both be back at full-time jobs and hopefully popping out a few kids, and we will never get this kind of teenager sleep again. Ever again. Until we retire. We have to seize the sleep opportunity while it presents itself because its fleeting.

So happy new year everybody. All our friends here in Stockholm are out of town, so we are going to a NYE party with complete strangers tonight, but are looking forward to it. And tomorrow, we leave for a week in Italy. Can. not. wait.

And if you can remember what we did to celebrate Stu's 32nd bday in 2009, can you remind us? Its bugging the crap out of me.

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