Pick a Card

We're not exactly lazy, no.. we just don't like leaving the house.

Also, maybe we're a little bit lazy.

Our first year and a half or so of living in Switzerland, we were out every weekend, seeing things and doing things and socializing with friends. We had originally signed on for a two-year stint here and we felt that we had to get the most out of every weekend before we had to leave. Around the 18 month point, we decided to stay for much much longer and Mr K transferred. The good thing about this was - obviously - that we were staying in Switzerland. The bad news was the lack of a departure deadline gave us all the excuse we needed to kick into lazy mode. Our outings slid back to once a month or so. We spent more time wandering around Fribourg and just relaxing at home. A few months later, Fetus Miss Bee made her first ultrasound appearance and laziness gave way to exhaustion, but with much the same result. We were rarely leaving our town, but when we did, we usually only traveled as far as Bern. Many naps were taken. Many DVDs were watched. Not much else was seen.

This was okay in the short-term, but with Bee's arrival and my starting to feel more like myself, Mr K wanted to make sure the laziness habit didn't stick for good. On January 1, he grabbed a spare deck of playing cards (you do NOT even want to know how many decks we have in our home - trust me) and a Sharpie and started making plans. Mr K reasoned that, once you remove the jokers, there are roughly the same number of playing cards in a deck as there are weeks in a year. On each card, he wrote one activity : invite friends over for lunch, spend the day reading, internet-free weekend, go someplace new, and many others. Sometime between Monday and Wednesday of each week, Mr K shuffles the cards and I draw one: that's our activity for the weekend. We draw the card early enough in the week to give us time to make plans, alert friends, and gather supplies. If a card is not seasonally or weather-ly appropriate, we are allowed to put it back in the deck and reshuffle. The only other acceptable excuses are sickness or baby-breakdown (we are realists, after all...)

We also got a big green album with just over 50 pages. For each activity, we will take at least one photograph to put in the album, along with the card and any relevant receipts, tickets, or other souvenirs. After a year, we should have a nearly empty deck of cards and a nearly full book of memories.

Our first three cards have been:

• Take a trip to Montreux
  
• Invite friends for lunch
• Read a book

All three have been completed, mostly successfully. The trip to Montreux was a bit baby-stressful, but we survived.

I can't wait to see what's in the cards for us next week...