Let’s Talk About Me, Shall We?

I’ve had a few things going on lately, and I feel a little disconnected. It’s Sophie’s birthday week, and I am utterly unprepared. Haven’t even sent out the evite for her party yet, whoops. (Although I think I have decided on a cake). So I am pretty much mother of the year, but you all knew that already. She’s really and truly weaned, and for that I am thankful, if not a little sad. Twice during the week after she last nursed, she got excited when thinking she was going to GET to nurse, and it broke my heart. Really, there is nothing funny about a crying toddler sticking her hand down your shirt and saying her newly-learned word “Please”. It’s a killer. But this past week she was fine and seems to be starting to be adjusting and it’s a relief.

So it is time to move on. There are a whole host of things I’ve said I would do after Sophie was weaned, and it’s time to do them. I need to get a sleep study done and find out why I can’t sleep. I need to get my #@! wisdom teeth out before they push my teeth together so hard that the front ones just pop right out of my head. I need to find out how to get my hormones back to normal.

I don’t want to do any of it. I just want it to be done.

*Sigh*

But first I have to get through Soph’s birthday, and then I’ll have the holidays to use as my excuse, right? So…I guess we’ll just have to pick this conversation up later…

In the meantime, I’d love for you to take a look at some of what I’ve been up to. Yesterday I published the Blissful Style 2008 Holiday Gift Guide over at Blissfully Domestic. Lots of stylish gifts at lots of different price ranges! Please go check it out and let me know what you think! Also, on Sunday, I guest posted at Velveteen Mind, in an effort to save Megan’s NaBloPoMo (National Blog Posting Month) efforts. I’d tell you what she calls NaBloPoMo but my mom reads this blog, so you will just have to head over there and find out for yourself!

Oooh one more little thing I need to let you in on. Did you like the contest we posted yesterday? I hope so, and I hope you get used to it! To celebrate the craziness that leads up to the Fa-la-la-la-Lalidays, Emily and I will be doing a giveaway every Monday until Christmas! It’s our Monday Holidaze Giveaways! So make sure and check in with us obsessively several times a day every Monday!

Mmmkay. That’s all I got, fer realzies. Now leave me a comment and tell me to get my ACT together!!

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Deck the Halls with TMI!

Emily may have decked her halls with OCD, but my family decked ’em with TMI! (That’s “too much information” for those of you who live under a rock.) Last Saturday my two older brothers and I, along with our spouses and kids, gathered at my parents’ home for our own little family Christmas. It was an all-day affair, starting with brunch and ending with dinner. In many ways, our family Christmas is atypical. For one thing, we all LIKE each other and have a great time together (right, guys? Right?), so it’s generally a very relaxed, easy-going gathering. Also, we all live near each other, so it’s not like we have a year’s worth of catching up to do in one afternoon. So basically, we just eat, open presents, and hang out. This year, however, there were two things that made this family Christmas special. The first was that it was unseasonably warm, and we were able to send the kids outside to play after presents (SCORE!) The second is that my brother Andy and his family brought this with them:

That’s right, the “EyeClops”. The EyeClops is like a microscope that you can plug into your TV, so you can view whatever it is you’re looking at on the screen. Andy & Sarah had purchased it as their family gift this year, being the good homeschoolers that they are, for the “educational value”. (Andy is also a high school biology teacher. Does that make the EyeClops’ presence seem any more legit?) And let me tell you, it has a LOT of educational value. Thanks to the EyeClops, I now know a lot of things about my family members that I don’t want to know. That’s right, while celebrating the birth of our Savior, we examined each other very up close & personal. Like 200-times-magnified up close and personal. I saw inside my brother’s nose (hairy), inside my dad’s ears (very hairy), and got some great views of my brother’s taste buds and arm hairs (he is generally QUITE hairy, except for on his head of course). I got a gross-out look at my nephew’s hangnail (right before brunch…appetizing), and found that one of my other nephews still has a blue stitch in a scar that got left in there. Whoops!! All of this was incredibly fascinating, but the coup d’etat was when Andy allowed the EyeClops an intimate look inside his BELLY BUTTON. Not only was it HAIRY, it was also full of LINT! VERY FULL! When he held the EyeClops up to that hairy orafice my whole family screamed “AAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHH!” in unison and HORROR. It looked like all the baby spiders from Charlotte’s Web had crawled in there and each spun about 15 webs. It was very, very scary. Andy claims he was extra-linty because he had on a new t-shirt, but I think it’s because he’s GROSS and all his HAIR traps stuff in there. Whatever the reason, it was hilarious, horrifying, and very-un-Christmasy. BUT, pretty much par for the course as far as our family get-togethers go. 🙂

Now I shall regale you with the top 5 EyeClops-induced quotes overheard at our family Christmas:

5) “You can see the hairs on my dad’s head really good ’cause the hairs are so little and far apart.” (My nephew about my brother Andy)

4) “Oh man, that’s gotta come OFF!” (My brother about a bump behind his ear)

3) “Oh, honey, that canNOT be healing right!” (My sister-in-law about my nephew’s hang nail)

2) “I knew it! I knew there was something blue in there!” (My other sister-in-law about my other nephew’s scar with a stitch in it)

1) “That sucker’s so big I can hear it growing!” (My dad about his own EAR HAIR!!!)

So, now, I know you ALL wish you were part of my family so you could’ve been in on all this fun…and I haven’t even told you about how my dad went up on the roof to get some of my nephew’s lost darts and ended up fixing the gutter! (Me: What’s that banging noise? My brother: Oh, dad went up on the roof to get the darts and found that the gutter was broken. Me: Ohhhh (cause that was not at all surprising!))

Maybe next year I’ll have a Christmas contest on this blog and the winner will get to come to our family celebration! I promise you it will be a once-in-a-lifetime event!

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The stuff memories are made of.

In the last few weeks, we’ve posted a lot about all the craziness of Christmas, and I know many of you have felt just as frazzled and harried as Jenny and I have. As parents, it seems like we drive ourselves thisclose to the looney bin, trying to make sure Christmas goes as smoothly as possible. We shop, we bake (or some of you do, so I hear), we wrap, we do all kinds of stuff to make sure our kids create memories of The Best Christmas Ever.

Despite all my planning and preparation, though, things didn’t go exactly as I had pictured them in my mind. For starters, after a long day of singing along to her new Hannah Montana cd into her new microphone (which is all she needed, thanks Grandma), Kate zonked out on the way to the Christmas Eve service at church. So instead of hearing her sing along to “Silent Night,” as I had pictured in my mind, I watched her sleep peacefully on the pew next to me. And she was out for the night. So much for the ritual of setting out cookies and milk for Santa and spreading the reindeer food on the lawn. I was so intent on doing these things that I tried to talk her into getting out of bed (I know, I’m insane) when she woke up briefly around 11:00. She was having none of it, though, and said “Mommy, I can’t. Santa will look down and see me!” None the less, she was thrilled to see the cookie crumbs, empty milk glass and reindeer food remnants left on Christmas morning. It wasn’t what I had envisioned, yet it was wonderful.

Tonight I spent some time thinking about why things like Santa’s cookies are important to me, and I realized that I just want her to have good memories of Christmas. And, more than anything, I want her to remember how very loved she is.

She won’t look back on Christmas and think to herself “That would have been a nice holiday if only I had gotten to put oatmeal and colored sugar on the lawn.” And she won’t think of it as a hectic day (as her dad and I have a tendency to do), being shuffled around to multiple places, but rather she’ll fondly remember visiting four houses (that’s right, four – two belonging to grandparents and two to great-grandparents. In one day.) filled with people who love her.

And that’s what Christmas memories are made of.

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