Dearests,

A short one today.

I was bustling with energy this morning – cleaned like a pro, put up Xmas tree & did all the decorations with the kids.

And then… I hit a wall. Totally knackered, felt like I was coming down with something.

Took some of my favourite immunity supplements and Vitamin C and went to bed for a while. Got up for an hour to interview my assistant for an upcoming podcast episode. Back to bed, fell asleep for a couple of hours. Chris woke me up and fed me dinner, and now I’m just waiting for bedtime again. My brain is kind of in that fuzzy, sleepy place.

I’m just hoping I am not coming down with anything – that would really harsh on my holiday plans.

I’ve been tossing up about whether to launch a new course, but I think I’m just going to focus on 2021 Goal Getter workbook sales until Jan 15 when we close orders for them. Make sure if you haven’t already – order before then. For the first time, I’ll be taking them off the market for the rest of the year. At the moment it’s taking up half my assistant’s work hours to manage our printing process, and we need to move onto new projects. If you’ve got any friends who need the books… make sure you buy them for them as a present, or get them to order now. And please don’t leave ordering them until after Christmas… we all know we fall into a post-Christmas coma and don’t wake up until end of Jan. Ha! Moral of story: don’t wake up Jan 16, realise you’ve forgotten to order yours, and email my assistant begging for them. They just won’t be available anymore.

Plus, you know, I think I probably just need to maybe have a holiday at some point. Come Christmas, I’ll likely be swimming about in that liminal space of not knowing what day it is. A bit of empty space to dream up what’s new.

We’re at home this year for Christmas. We’ll drive up for an early Christmas celebration day with my in-laws. And then hopefully Wild Bushman Dad will drive down to stay with us for a few days. I’m remarkably relaxed in my Christmas preps – I was finished in November. I’ll write that post about how I did it, and finish up that Best Books list for you as well… once my brain is functioning again.

Only things left for me to do:

• Order our annual Blurb photo album of all the digital photos taken this year. I get their free BookWright software to pull photos from Facebook to make it even easier. I’ve been doing it for 10 years now since Starry was born – it’s a lovely way to make photo memories a little bit more real.
• Get Santa photos with the family. Again – have been doing it since Starry was born. Then every December I splay them out in matching white frames from 2010 through to now. I just love seeing the kids’ grow, and our family bloom, from year to year. This year our local shopping centre doesn’t have Santa, and instead we get greenscreened into a Christmas sleigh with him. HILARIOUS. I can’t wait. What a very pandemic memory!

I’d already ordered HelloFresh’s Christmas box – I bought it last year and fucking loved it. I used to buy it just for regular weekly meals as well, but stopped to try the Fast800. After the fast, I tried continuing on with weekly meal planning, grocery shopping & cooking Fast-style meals. But I totally bombed out at it.

I don’t know why, but having the recipes and ingredients turn up in little brown bags with step by step photo instructions = Leonie being a domestic goddess. I fucking LOVE cooking when I do it like this! But me having to meal plan, grocery shop for all the ingredients, remember what I meal planned and find all the ingredients in my cupboard = complete domestic failure.

It’s just how it is. I’m great at lots of things, but not at everything. Pre-prepped ingredient bags help with whatever executive functioning stuff I’ve got going on. Anyways, that’s a long round about way of saying: after cooking fuck-all, I’m back to using HelloFresh for our weekly meals again. I’ve never been so excited to cook again.

I will say, the HelloFresh meals are massssssive. I’ve got friends who do HelloFresh and say the same thing – they definitely do nottttt skimp on meal size. In the interest of health consciousness, I’m going to try halving the serving size. So a “meal for 2” will give us 4 servings. I’m also steering away from their pasta dishes, and will leave the rice side dish out of their Asian-styled meals – after doing Fast800 I realise how much more energy I have when I don’t have high-carb stuff.

Well, this has notttt been the short writing I thought it would be today. Once I got into the flow though… it felt so much better, and my brain started working again.

I must say, I’ve been a lot more productive since I’ve started daily writing. It’s a little bit like enforced Morning Pages. It clears out my head in the very best of ways. And I feel a bit like I’m on purpose again.

Want my daily writings via email?

Until tomorrow, my loves,