This Tuesday I watched MrD be a star (literally - all the children in his nursery were twinkling stars) in his school's Christmas pageant, and I cried pretty much non-stop for the entire time that he and his friends were on-stage, singing their hard-learned song and doing their star-dance. They were all working so hard, all lit up with excitement and nerves, and oh, they were beautiful.

(Especially mine, of course, to me. But I feel okay about that since I'm 100% certain that every other parent thought the same about their child.)

Then on Wednesday, while he was at school, I wrote like the wind, catching up on my latest freelance project. I wrote another 2400 words on it today...

...And that's it. Whew. No more childcare - a.k.a., no more scheduled writing sessions - until January 7th. Ack! On the one hand, I feel panicked. My deadlines! My productivity!

On the other hand...this is a choice that Patrick and I made together. This is the first time in the last two years that we haven't booked a childminder for at least four or five days of the two-week holiday. In other years, that childcare felt not just right but necessary for our situation (and I think it really was, looking back on it); this time, though, it suddenly felt wrong.

See, I sat down with my calendar and my list of deadlines, and I worked out that I could actually make my unmissable freelance deadline even with a two-week family holiday. What I couldn't do would be to move forward as far and as fast on my own personal deadlines as I had hoped. (I really want to get my Low Road rewrite done as soon as possible, to show my editors; I also really want to get moving with my next book.) Those are real issues for me, and I really struggled with them in making this decision...

But then I started thinking. The last two years...they've been really frantic, on a personal level. I've been learning how to be a freelance worker, balancing different projects and timetables. I've been scrambling as hard as possible to make sure I'm always earning my part of our family's income. And part of that has meant learning the lesson: Never stop working! Ever!

That lesson really made a difference for me in the last couple of years - and it's a large part of why our finances are much more reliable now than they were two years ago. I'm grateful to have learned that habit of discipline.

But do I really want to teach MrD that we never have real, lengthy holidays together, the kind that I sank into and loved as a child?

If I really needed that time to work, because I had unmissable deadlines that couldn't otherwise be met, then honestly, I would sigh and say Yes. This is just how it has to be, like it or not. I know lots of wonderful parents who have to make that choice every year, just as we had to in the last couple of years.

But for once, it doesn't have to be that way for us. And so...

Well, I'm still going to try to find bits and pieces of time whenever possible to play with Low Road and the next book over the next couple of weeks. But I also decided that it was important to go ahead and, for once, for these two weeks, to put my work at the corners of my life instead of the forefront.

For all I know, I may be scrambling for time and booking childcare again next year, or the year after. So I'm not going to miss this chance, not by choice. And Patrick made the same decision for his work.

We're going to have a real, two-week-long family holiday, for the first time in years. And I can't wait.