Christmas ughs

I do not like Christmas.  Too much stress.  Too much travel. 

Anyway.

One of my big gripes this year was that nothing matches in this house.  (The bedroom curtains?  Four curtains, 3 shades of beige.  Clearance.)  You can tell I bought most of the lights at the after-Christmas clearance, and I was even late for that, because I don't have 2 of anything for lights.  Well, I do have two strings of warm white net lights.  Except that one of them is only half-working for some reason.  So, outside I've got one blue net, one multi net, one cool white net, and one twinkling multi net.  And the twinkle is not changeable. 

So, I just spent $85 on Christmas lights, in spite of just getting the heads-up on middle school tuition for next year.  But, I'll have 4 matching LED nets, damn it.  And they can even do multi, warm white, or blink between multi and white.  But they were 30% off and buy 3 get 1 free, decent brand name (Philips), and have a 3-year warranty.  And while i was at it, I got 4 strings of purple LED sphere lights.  Only 10% off, but also buy 3 get 1 free. 

The holidays

Christmas:  Four weeks (or more) of guilt, stress, guilt, headaches, stress, and more guilt.  Followed by a 3 day period of trying to be two places at once, driving too much, not enough sleep, not enough food, and too much rushing around.  Capped with having "our" Christmas at home on about December 27th if we're lucky. 

I hate Christmas. 

In fact, I hate the whole last quarter of the year, October through December.  It sucks.

Halloween season

Or, making this year's costume.

El Burrito has decided, after lots of discussion, to be Word Girl this year (yes, a "girl" - although she's also an alien. This led to discussion at the grandparents' house. He's already been a monster (Cookie) and an elephant(Horton), why shouldn't he be a girl/alien/superhero??). Next year he wants to be Super Why.

Official Word Girl costumes are about $35 and only available online, and if they're anything like the official Horton costume we saw, they're cheaply made. So it's DIY again. Luckily, I bought a sewing machine for a whopping $6 at a yard sale this summer. Even more luckily, it actually appears to work. :) And Jo-Ann's was having a sale on cotton fabric last weekend, so cape supplies came to under $5 (a bit more if you count the machine needles).

I went to Target today looking for the rest of the costume. Red seems to be "in" for kids this year, so I found a plain red shirt and leggings at Target, plus gloves and tights/legwarmers that will turn into boot covers. Much happiness on the way home.

Now I just have to actually make the cape, figure out how to do a hood, and muddle together a felt costume so our stuffed monkey can be Captain Huggy Face, Word Girl's trusty sidekick. DH and I have been told that we're going to be Mr. Botsford (Word Girl's adoptive father - her alter ego is Becky Botsford) and Becky's best friend Violet. I wanted to be Granny May and DH could be The Butcher, but we were told that we could only dress as Good Guys, not Villains. :)

Happy New Year

Happy New Year, everyone.

Accomplishments for 2010: probably a few. The two I can recall are buying a house and managing to read 300 books in one year (if I include the books I read aloud to El Burrito in that total).

Abnormal weather here. High today of 68, low tonight 19. High on Saturday of 28. There were tornado watches/warnings in the area today. Bizarre.

Went to our usual NYE party with friends. El Burrito made it to midnight (fell asleep on the way home) and was very well behaved. No crying, shoving, Wii-mote hoarding, or tattling.

Snow

First real snow of the year (a week or so ago it was spitting snow, but nothing accumulated, other than along the edges of the car windows).




Right now, we've got an inch or so outside. So, it's a good thing that I bought a snow shovel yesterday, and that we put up the Xmas lights today.

Christmas traditions

So far, as a family, we have one tradition of our own (not involving Parental Units, etc.). For the past few years, we've gone to see the tree-lighting ceremony at Shelter Insurance. They do it up pretty nice: the local news sends a camera truck, there's a choir and band from a local school, Santa Claus, the whole bit.


The weather was nice this year, relatively speaking, but I thought we might not be able to go. El Burrito got hit with what seems like a rebound of the ear infection he had before Thanksgiving, and spent most of the day in bed. But we started the antibiotics today, and that plus a solid dose of ibuprofen perked him up enough that he wanted to see the tree this year. So I bundled him up and we drove to Shelter.


We saw them putting the tree up on Monday, I think. It's fake, breaks down to a metal frame and maybe a dozen sections of "tree" so it goes up pretty swiftly.



This year the lights are all clear.

They advertise the ceremony as starting at 6:00, and they aren't kidding. We were headed back for the car at 6:05 (we didn't stand in line to see Santa, since El B. is sickly today). Better to get there early than on time, because you might miss it.

And then we came home, tempted El Burrito's appetite with a cheeseburger and fries from McDonald's, and he napped on the couch some more. We passed the time watching the Macy's Thanksgiving Parade on the new DVR, which is already almost full. Highlights: the pizza-twirling drill team, the Sesame Street float, and the balloons of Horton, Buzz Lightyear, Snoopy, and Kermit.

Christmas again

I probably said this last year, but I swear, I will not go through this again next year. We left the mall at 10:35 on the 23rd - in a drenching rain, I might add. And we still have three things to buy at the grocery store tomorrow before we're officially done with the Christmas shopping. That's right, once again we've put things off and are shopping on Christmas Eve. We had dinner at McDonald's, which is SOOOO not on my "Top 100 places to Eat" list. Meh.

Technically, we're not done, because DH and I aren't really done buying for each other. I gave up and told him I couldn't come up with anything good. He's getting 2 books, a video and his traditional Dilbert page-a-day calendar, even though last' years is still sitting in the box. We'll buy something for each other later. DH is mentioning a Blu-ray player, but I'm not in favor of the idea. No room for it on the TV stand, and we only have 3 Blu-ray discs (thanks to the new Blu-ray/DVD combo pack idea).

Lately I don't enjoy Christmas, I come close to hating the whole mess, and I think this is part of the reason. Spending Christmas week shopping means I don't have time to relax and actually appreciate the holiday. Plus there's travel issues. Christmas Eve at DH's family, plus midnight mass (technically 10:30 mass), means 2 hours of driving total, and we get home around 3:00 a.m. since they do gifts after mass. Then we haul out of bed Christmas morning and drive to my family, 2 hours one way. And I'm usually stressing because we're never early enough to suit my mom, and half the time they've opened all the other gifts before we get there.

So I'm putting a BIG note in my planner next Halloween, reminding me to start working on the holiday prep, or I'll have to kick my own butt.

On the up side (kind of), looks like we'll have a white christmas this year, even with the thunderstorm on Wednesday night.

Christmas

We took down the Christmas decorations yesterday. The boxes are all still in the corner, because I know I'll run across odds and ends of holiday stuff for a few more days.

Next year, I'm doing a few things differently. I've been disappointed the last few Christmases, and I think I figured out part of what's behind it. We don't have any real holiday traditions, routines, or whatever you want to call them. I hung two strands of lights a couple weeks before Christmas, and pulled out the fiber-optic tree (only 28 inches tall - the only decorating it gets is a strand of metallic beads). Other than the wreath I made this year, that was the grand total of our decorating.

We went to watch a local tree-lighting. That was very anti-climactic, it took all of 10 minutes. We spent more time driving there and back than we did at the actual ceremony. (I think someone was in a hurry that night.) And there was one Christmas party, at the church.

The one thing we did this year that was new, was drive through a light display back where my parents live. The city did a lot of work on it, and it was pretty cool. I meant to drive around town here and see the lights, but between the weather and DH being a workaholic, it never happened.

That's it. No cookies, no baking, no caroling, no decent decorating. No standing in line at the mall to see Santa. Our Christmas is crap. No wonder it seemed like it was all over in two days. It really was.

So, next year, I've decided that things will be different. We're going to have a little more ceremony, and start the holiday prep sometime around Thanksgiving. By then, we'll have a house, so I can put up more than two measly strings of lights. We can get the full-size tree out of storage, and the ornaments. I'll dig out the box of Breyer Christmas horses and put them all on display, and line up my Hallmark rocking horse ornaments. Maybe I'll make holiday cookies with El Burrito - I've already got red and green sugar-sprinkles for them. Maybe we'll get a little Nativity scene. Or not - I'd probably get a better one in the after-holiday sales. I'll remember earlier to go look at the holiday lights around town. Maybe I'll get organized and we'll do some kind of countdown - Advent calendar, wall calendar, whatever.

And maybe, I hope, it'll feel more like Christmas. Because this year didn't. So much for things being "more magical" with kids. All I've experienced is a bigger headache from trying to make sure someone gets a nap in between car trips and late-night church.

Welcome, Great Pumpkin!

The Halloween Report:

The costume was finished in time (although the ears could use some tweaking - they fall forward too easily). The only thing I didn't manage to do was come up with a clover and Who-speck. El Burrito had a visit from my parents during the day, which led to a late and short nap, and also meant I didn't have time to paint a cotton ball for the clover.

(Photo: El Burrito with his jack-o-lanterns from last year (left) and this year.)

For Halloween, we went trick-or-treating at Hyvee again, and then out to DH's parents' house for some treats. Horton got some nice compliments about the costume, and we were the only elephant there at the time. (There was one other Horton at Hyvee, apparently - they took pics of all the Treaters and had them posted on a wall so you could pick up your kid's picture. Other Horton had a different costume, it might have been a generic elephant. It may have even been the elephant costume that Old Navy had a year or so ago - it looked a lot like our ON mouse, but with different ears.)

After we got home, the Great Pumpkin came to visit. We piled all of our pumpkins into the chair (we had one real pumpkin and a bunch of craft pumpkins) and covered them with a blanket. Then El Burrito closed his eyes and said "Where are you, Great Pumpkin" or something like that, while I stuffed his Great Pumpkin gifts under the blanket.

(Photo: El Burrito and his Pile O' Pumpkins)

The Great Pumpkin didn't bring the blue vacuum cleaner that El Burrito kept mentioning. He did bring a Webkinz beagle (promptly named Suzie Puppy after my brother's dog), a K'Nex Cookie Monster (half-price grand opening coupon from Michaels), a book called Pumpkin Pumpkin, and a handful of Safari animals (also from Michaels).


The gifts were a hit, so we'll probably be doing another Great Pumpkin visit next year.

Halloween

El Burrito is pretty certain that the Great Pumpkin should bring him a blue vacuum cleaner for a Halloween present. Given that he still turns into a Cling-on when I get the vacuum out of the closet, and really didn't care for the toy vacuum at Toys R Us, I think maybe he's confused somewhere.

So far, The Great Pumpkin will be bringing a book that we found a the book sale(Pumpkin, Pumpkin), a stuffed animal (either a Webkinz beagle or the Bath & Body Works free lambie), and possibly a handful of toy animals from Michaels.

I'm still working on the costume. Got a bit done yesterday while the furnace guys were here. The ears are sewed together (two layers of felt) and stuffed, the tail is attached, and I un-stuffed the eyes and stitched them down. I still have to do the trunk and sew the ears to the head. The trunk should be fairly easy. DH was playing around with the fleece, and found that if you roll it up, it looks amazingly trunk-like. It'll just need to be seamed and cut to the right length. I may sew some felt toenails to the feet, and I need to find something pink for the clover and speck. DH found the tub with the Halloween decorations, and there are a couple of green pipecleaners that will be a great clover stem. With an hour or so of focused work tonight, I should make some good progress.

Speaking of the decorations tub, I'm pretty sure there's another Halloween tub somewhere. I know I got some mini jack-o-lanterns that light up, and a set of candles from Hallmark (cat, ghost, and skull, I think). But we found the jack-o-lantern lights and a few other things, so we're doing good. Now if El Burrito will just forget that he learned how to plug in the light-up jack-o-lantern. He was very impressed with himself for figuring it out while I wasn't looking, but I'd prefer that he didn't fiddle with electricity for another few years.

Still recovering

We're still digging out of the Xmas avalanche, so not much is going on of any consequence.

We're still looking for DH's wedding ring, although I haven't had a chance this week to really dig around and hunt for it. I'm hoping that it shows up soon, but that may be a hopeless idea. It's off cavorting somewhere with my original Swiss Army Knife, which hasn't been seen since our wedding day. I kept hoping to find it, and swore that I'd trip over it as soon as I ordered the replacement, but no such luck yet. (I'm still expecting it to appear after we move and unbox everything.)

Need to work on the goals for 2008, and figure out what, if anything, actually got accomplished in 2007. More on that later. I've gotta go roust a Burrito from his nap so we can get ready for our holiday partying.

Still looking

I'm still looking for DH's ring, and digging out of the Xmas avalanche. Bah!

We survived Christmas

The only serious casualty so far is that DH misplaced his wedding band somewhere and we haven't found it yet. Can't even pinpoint the last time he remembers having it on, so it could be a fun time.

We're actually not done with Christmas. Thanks to a rotten schedule, El Burrito has one more Christmas morning to get through. We spent Christmas Eve with DH's family, and Christmas Day with mine, so we decided to hold off on opening the things we (and Santa) got him until Saturday morning, so we can have some time to enjoy it. I'd wanted to open some Christmas morning, but that was spent rushing around to get to my Mom's in time for gifts, so it didn't happen. Which means DH and I haven't opened ours either.

This is one of my gripes with Christmas - I'm 35 freaking years old, and the only time I've had a nice relaxed Christmas morning as an "adult" would be the year that we had a snowstorm on Christmas morning. The weather was too bad to drive, so DH and I stayed here and had time to open our gifts without being in a rush. Of course, that was also the day I found my first grey hair (having dark hair stinks - it makes the grey stick out like a sore thumb). Other than that one year, I've spent every Christmas morning for the past ten or so hurrying to get to Mom's before everything was over.

I swear, it's going to be different next year. I just don't know how yet.

And later, after everything's unpacked and sorted out, you may get the details on how head-bangingly frustrating my Christmas has been. Or not. :)

3 Days left

Well, only three days until Christmas now.

In spite of watching A Charlie Brown Christmas almost every day, and listening to the soundtrack a lot, I still don't feel like it should be Christmas already. At least the shopping is finished, so we don't have to go anywhere near the mall this weekend. There's just the wrapping to do, and the endless driving to look forward to.

El Burrito and I did hit the mall this morning, since his photos were ready to pick up. Wouldn't you know, the one time I was hoping they'd print a few "extras" to tempt me with (one pose in particular), they didn't do any at all. The clerk was surprised that there weren't any specs. So, I guess I'll have to see if I want them bad enough to pay "full" price for them. El Burrito got lucky in Target. He's been playing all week with a little "Cars" wallet that I got in Target's Dollar Spot - it's a gag gift for BIL. I went to Target this morning planning to buy El Burrito one, since he's so enamored of the other one. He got the only one I could find, and it was hiding in a bunch of play mats. Target's already got the Valentine stuff out in the Dollar Spot, and Christmas lights are already 30% off. Jeez, can't the Christmas sales wait until, oh, maybe after Christmas?

We also came home with a certain Cookie Monster stocking, crazy as it may be. Pictures later, it's just too funny. Or maybe I'm just odd.

Wrapping Day!

After lunch today (i.e. in about 90 minutes), Wrapping Day 2007 will kick in.

Thanks to El Burrito, the usual routine has to be modified. We'll be watching A Charlie Brown Christmas with lunch (because we have no kitchen table, and eat in the living room), and then I'm putting in a Due South DVD and El Burrito can supervise from the playpen while I wrap and watch. I usually watch the "Victoria's Secret" 2-part episode (nothing to do with the underwear store!), but someone, in their infinite wisdom, put Part 1 on Side A and Part 2 on Side B. I may not want to hassle with flipping the disc, or dealing with double-sided discs at all, so I may watch different episodes.

We need to finish wrapping today, or at least wrap the stuff that has El Burrito so distracted. The gift pile includes a Cars wallet, a car-shaped mouse, and a Tracfone, all of which the boy keeps digging out of the gift tub and toting around. He gets a little cranky when I take those away from him.

At the very least, DH's surprises and the "distracting" gifts are getting wrapped today. Tonight, we haul out the tub of El Burrito's goodies, and decide what Santa's bringing and what we're giving him. Somehow, it's worked out that almost all his toys are wood-based, and only two need batteries. I'm sure that won't be the case for the gifts from his grandparents, but it's a start. We'll find out later how the Fisher Price Computer Learning System works out. His grandma got it for him, because the boy can not leave the keyboard and mouse alone, but I'm not sure that giving him another reason to play with the keyboard is the way to go.

Christmas Countdown

So, here it is, less than a week until Christmas. We still have one person to shop for and a few gifts to pick up (gift cards).

And practically NOTHING is wrapped, because someone (who will remain nameless, but he's the only toddler in the house) flat-out refused to nap today and insists on staying up way later than he should. So I got no wrapping done today, or even a lousy shower, thank you. I don't normally bug the DH at work, but I had to call him earlier just to vent a little. And to have him talk to that little someone on the phone about naptime, but it didn't work.

Yeah, it's a great day. And it's been this way all week.

One week until Christmas!

Eeek. And, it turns out, the big box of wrapping stuff (bows, ribbon, etc) is in storage, and has been for a year or two, DH says. So we're stuck with the wrapping paper that was stored under the couch. No ribbon this year.

I swear, next year, I'm really decorating. Not just three strings of lights and a 2-foot tree; we're going all out. And by then, I'll have some of those spiral trees that I like so much, but have no place to display.

It's unnatural

Really. The weather forecast right now is predicting a high in the 50s for Christmas day in Missouri. That's just not right. This isn't California or Florida, darn it, it's supposed to be cold (and ideally snowy) for Christmas.

I want a white Christmas! Thought I was going to get one, what with 7 inches of snow on the ground right now and a single-digit wind chill, but no. It's going to be in the 40s by Thursday, so all we'll have is acres of sloppy mud.

This stinks.

More snow

We got a lovely snow overnight, probably four inches, and it's still snowing. No holiday shopping for us today. :(

Hopefully the church's Santa Claus dinner tomorrow won't be cancelled again. It was originally last weekend, but the ice storm postponed it. One way or another, I'd like for El Burrito to get to meet Santa this year, now that he's old enough to sort of get it.

I swear . . .

. . . that as soon as we get through Christmas and New Year's, we will be house-hunting again. The boy and this place are getting on my last nerve this week, and it wasn't a sturdy nerve to begin with.

Believe it or not, the only sizable place I can find to put things (Christmas gifts, fragile things, whatever) out of El Burrito's reach? The bathtub. Because there are really only 4 rooms here, none of which can be made a No Burrito zone, unfortunately. The bathtub hasn't been used for bathing in a few years, because the person who designed the front bathroom was obviously smoking something that day. After they squeezed in a tub, toilet, and sink, there's not enough room to turn around. There's about an inch of clearance between the door and the toilet, and when the door is open, the tub is inaccessible. (Which is why El Burrito is still getting sink baths.)

Anyway. The fact that I can't keep things out of the boy's reach is getting to be a problem, and it'll only get worse the taller he gets. Luckily he hasn't broken anything yet, or managed to hurt himself, although he's got a habit of "relocating" things (his comb has been missing for a month). He likes to play with the PC mouse and keyboard, and short of unplugging them, the desk isn't wide enough to put them out of reach. He's rebooted the PC once, and somehow has found a key combo that will log me out, log his father in, and make the PC attempt to install Paint Shop Pro (even though it's already installed).

So, we've got to move soon. Really. (Yes, I've been saying this for, oh, 3 years now. This time, I may actually mean it.)

*****

In other news, we got El Burrito's photo taken at Sears last night, and a family portrait. It took 2 hours, most of that deciding what to order afterwards (and I managed to not get a print of one of the best ones). Oh, and Jan? We made it out with $70 worth of prints. I was tempted to get the photo CD again, but they wanted $69.99 for it. Now, if they have a $19.99 "special" when I pick up the prints, I may consider it, but $70 is insane.