Why I Won't Be Doing Holidailies This Year

I signed up for Holidailies with the best of intentions... for quite a few years now, Holidailies has been the one consistent month of blogging that I've done in any given calendar year. So I signed up for it again, determined to knock out one more good month out of 12.

And then life got in the way. So it looks like this post will be a cascade of reasons why I'm not going to succeed at Holidailies this year:

• My wife and I both work full-time in education--a career that can easily take every spare moment you have.
• We have kids who are nearly 4 years old and 20 months (today!), which can easily take every spare moment you have.
• We bought a house last spring. Speaking of things that can take up spare moments, home ownership is somewhere near the top of that list.
• My wife is working on her Master's degree. Did I say something about spare moments?
• And our lovely new house is at least 15 minutes from the school where we work (compared to a 2-minute drive before this and a 2-minute walk before that). 

So yeah: Holidailies probably isn't happening this year.

But even as I type that--even as I thought about it before I started typing any of this, a defiant streak arose within me, a streak that wants to find a way to carve out just a little writing time every day over the course of this month. It's going to be hard: I should try to keep these short, because I don't have much time to devote to them, but as Blaise Pascal said: Je n'ai fait celle-ci plus longue que parce que je n'ai pas eu le loisir de la faire plus courte.To paraphrase: I would have written a shorter blog post, but I didn't have time.

But we'll see: maybe I can pull some worthwhile writing out of this month; as a parent and a teacher, I know for a fact that stranger things have happened.