Holiday Ramble

I have been so busy lately that my head is spinning. I am waking up feeling stressed and disorganized and the last thing I should be doing is blogging. I need to get my thoughts out though. Just where to start is the problem... So I shall do as I have many times before on this blog and ramble until I feel like my mental itch has been scratched. Then I plan on taking a 10 minute power nap before the kids get home and I have to start baking a lot of goodies. My bet is that the kids will take precedence over the baking like the past 3 days, but we'll see....

On with my ramble-fest. My Christmas cards are in the works but the photo I ordered is pretty bad. The quality just isn't great. I hope those of you who are used to getting better from us will understand. It's hard to get a good shot every year. And as long as I am making excuses, the letter is not a masterpiece either. T is not motivated, and I am too busy. Sorry. I'm behind on sewing, photo album making, baking, and wrapping- you name it and I haven't done it yet.

Frustration with kids losing things seems to be the theme for our month. First Little Boy misplaced his violin bow. He accidentally left the violin at the elementary school overnight and when he brought it home the next day the bow was missing. Sigh! It's a rental too. Poor kid was so stressed out that I didn't have the heart to be upset with him. Especially not when I have lost my keys multiple times myself in the past two weeks. Luckily both have been found- bow and keys. Then Middle Boy reported that he lost his 100.00 calculator. The one they loan from the school that they make your parents sign a note saying it will be paid for if lost. Yes, that one. It's been looked for, prayed about, looked for some more- not found yet. Guess it's just going to test our faith- and possibly his pocketbook. I told him that may be what he gets for Christmas this year.

Big Boy just had to join us and lose his violin shoulder rest this week. The sad sad thing about this is that since September he has managed to lose or break two previous shoulder rests. I even bought him a new violin case that would hold the shoulder rest to avoid the problems we were having. I guess a new case won't instantly make him responsible enough to put the darn thing inside it though. So now we are on shoulder rest number 4 (an extra we had that he couldn't stand- he is no longer complaining about that one now-strange). I was seeing red over this last night. I would have been more sympathetic if he would have just stopped reading his book long enough to have a conversation with me about it. It's his second big mistake this week since he crashed my ancient ceramic nativity set during a pillow fight and tried to cover it up. Merry Christmas Mom! HELP me!

One piece of good violin news though is that Little Boy confided in me last night on our way to cub scouts, that he is really glad that he is taking violin lessons. He "really likes it." That is what a good teacher will do I suppose. The clerk at the violin rental store was right- "that teacher is worth every penny." And she gets a lot of our pennies- each month.

I have been working on a gift for T that has been so emotionally draining that I think I better stop and do something else for a few days. I have been cutting and pasting past emails from our family and T back and forth from when he was in Iraq for 6 months. Reading those emails is taking me back to last winter and how tough it was. I walk around like a zombie after reading, wondering how I ever did that. I am not alone this Christmas and still I feel totally swamped. I must have had heavenly help. Heaven knows there was no physical help around (at least not with the daily grind). My email novel Is 122 pages long! (That's a lotta love). I went for more ink today and we're about to go to press.

Well that ought to brighten your day after reading all my woes! Hope you are all coping well with the stress of the season. I am going to try and slow down and enjoy it more. Happy holidays : )