Good evening!

How was your Christmas? Ours was lovely and extremely busy. We had Christmas with my family on Saturday night at our house, went to my parents’ house Sunday evening, and then had Christmas with Hubby’s family at his brother’s house on Monday.

Yesterday my two year old came down with an extra nasty case of the flu, and wow is she ever sick. I’ve changed her sheets twice, her clothes four times (I think.. I sort of lost track), she’s had two baths since yesterday morning, and is running a pretty hefty fever. Today she’s spent most of the day alternating between sleeping and being miserable.

At the moment she’s sitting on my lap practicing her BTU machine impression and trying to move as little as possible. In an optimistic moment she told me she wanted down. Five seconds later I found her lying on her back crying in the hallway, so now she’s back on my lap again. This is my girl who usually lives in fifth gear, so she’s feeling pretty awful. If it doesn’t improve by tomorrow I’ll probably call the doctor. I’m praying the other four kids don’t get it too (or me or hubby). Yucko!

I hope your Christmas was Merry and that you New Year’s will be equally so.

Merry Christmas! Are you all ready? Presents wrapped, pies made (or ingredients purchased), cards mailed out, etc.? Let’s see, I have one and a half of those things done. We passed out all the cards that go to our friends at church on Sunday, but we still need to mail the ones that go to say, family and other friends. Yeah, that might be good. Here’s our Christmas picture that went out with the card.

Last year Hubby was really irritated that he couldn’t come up with a good concept, so he’s pretty pleased with himself this year. I love that Kyra (the two year old) is the only one with a little bit of a grin. Such a little imp!

Hubby’s home today and tomorrow, so I wrote up a grocery list for him and he bravely took all four of the older kids to the grocery store to go buy things like pumpkin pack and waffles. Faith is napping, so I have a few minutes here to listen to Christmas music and work.

We are having Christmas dinner (or rather, Christmas Eve Eve dinner) at our house on Saturday with my side of the family. Last year I was eight months pregnant at Christmas, so we had it catered. No, not with white gloved waiters or anything like that. A local restaurant made it all and we picked it up. Prime Rib, veggies, salad, garlic mashed potatoes, cranberry relish, stuffing - it was great! In fact, it was so great that we decided to do it again this year.

Now all I have to do is get the house clean (and somehow make it stay clean this time! Maybe I’ll ground it if it doesn’t clean itself up. Or revoke it’s telephone priviledges. That should work, right?), wrap all the presents, get out all the fancy dishes (and keep the kids at least ten feet away from them at all times), and do a teensy bit more shopping for the kiddos. I feel like I’ve been playing catch up every since we moved, and being disorganized drives me crazy! I’m so glad we’re catering again this year.

And also because we are stupid, we decided to have a little New Year’s Eve party at our house next weekend (we were thinking probably on New Year’s Eve…). Since our house is a bit smaller than our last one, Hubby informed me that we couldn’t invite everyone we know. Fine, no problem. He seemed to have ideas on how the party should go, so he was in charge of the inviting.

Half an hour later he trundles down the stairs with a fistful of flyers to pass out to the people we’re inviting. How many does he have? Oh, only thirty. Ha! Aw shucks, what will I ever tease him about now? Since apparently we’re having half the city over for New Years, we spent Saturday cleaning out the entire garage so we can do karaoke in there at the party.

Since we have never before actually cleaned our garage in the throw-away-half-your-junk fashion, this was a relatively large undertaking. It took about six or seven hours and was very cold (I cleaned in my hat and gloves). However, our garage is now lovely and I feel all light and airy from having tossed so much useless garbage. Personally, I don’t think it’s coincidental that the word “garage” is a mere one letter off from the word “garbage.”

And what were our five children doing while we were cleaning outside? Well, they were un-cleaning inside, of course. You should have seen our house that night! Blech!!! Unbelievable. Apparently the kids found Candyland and Chutes and Ladders and decided that those would be much more decorative if all the pieces were combined with a zillion Bionicle pieces and evenly distributed among the sea of clean laundry that they had disbursed all over the living room floor (it was originally waiting patiently on the love seat for a cheery visit from the Folding Elf).

I think they had also emptied out most of the contents of their bedroom toy boxes too because I’m pretty sure I saw a Polly Pockets island and other miscellania floating about as well (this is not to be confused with Paradise Island, which is where Wonder Woman is from. Polly Pockets are little perfectly coiffed plastic girls with a wide variety of interesting clothing. Oh wait, maybe they are the same…).

Anyway, Hubby and I spent Saturday evening working on Christmas cards and then Sunday we were gone for church, so I spent more or less the entire day cleaning up on Monday. Of course, it was all blown up again by Tuesday, but that’s more or less the way of it with small kids.

When I finished making my grocery list this morning, I discovered Faith under the table (not unusual) swimming in the yogurt that I didn’t see Kyra drop down there while I was in the bathroom (moderately less usual). I picked her up out of the yogurt slime and went to go find her some clean clothes.

When I got back, she was busy sliming herself some more with a small piece of pear that Hubby had given to Anika, who had decided she didn’t want it and had re-gifted to Kyra, who had decided that she didn’t want it either so had of course dropped it on the floor. Argh! Do you see a pattern here? Hmmm, now what could it be? You know, she’s so sweet when she’s sleeping. It’s just the other ten hours a day or so that there’s a problem…

Wow, you know what? This is really long! I guess I should wrap this up and let you get back to your wrapping presents (or panicking because you’re not ready for Christmas, whichever seems more productive to you). Have a Merry, yogurt slime free Christmas and I’ll see you next week!