Coughing in a Winter Wonderland....

Well, I solved the grout problem - I went out and bought plastic shower curtain liners and spread them all over the eating area and some throw rugs and threw them (that's what you're supposed to do, right?) over the work area; so now I can stop carping at my kids about their food-dropping habits. And the shower curtain liners are transparent, so you can still see the pretty new tile. Maybe I'll use the liners even after the grout is sealed, and just throw them out and replace them when they get dirty - I've always wanted a disposable kitchen floor.

Let's see....health update....Susie all better, Rachel better except that she starts coughing and cannot stop, and now Brian is coming down with whatever lovely virus this is that we've been passing around. Good Lord, I'm tired. The problem with head colds is that you need to sleep to get better, but you can't breathe if you lie down. I really like to breathe. So I sit up and surf the blogosphere, or I try to learn Spanish with the free Rosetta Stone program from the local library. I can now say, "The man has blue hair" in Spanish - pretty good, huh? Of course, I'm not sure how useful that sentence would be if I were lost, say, in Colombia. Maybe it would be better if I said, "The horse is jumping!"

Maybe not.

Perhaps my time would be better spent figuring out how to get Theo's MP3 player to work. Frankly, it's hard to believe that this little red plastic doo-hickey that is the length of my thumb and only twice as wide is truly a "skip-free MP3/WMA player, FM radio with 32 preset stations, voice recorder, stopwatch, clock." It looks like something my kids would get out of a gumball machine (if I let them have the quarter) (which I don't). I think I've been had.

Anna is pitching a fit as I type. Don't ask.

We are full-swing into the sugar-overdose segment of the holidays. Let's see - there was the church Christmas party last Friday, and the boys' CCD classes had a party this evening (because that is just what kids need on a school night at 8 PM - lots of candy and cookies), and tomorrow is our annual gingerbread house decorating extravaganza. It's embarrassing how much money I spend on the candy for that. But the kids need the Twizzlers so they can cut them into realistic-looking shingles for the roofs, and they need the gumdrops and skittles to decorate the walls; and of course the mini-marshmallows are required to build "snowmen" in the "yards"; and then there are the gummi bears which have no apparent purpose, but I bought them one year and now they are tradition. And don't forget the 6 pounds of confectioner's sugar to make the "glue" and the fake snow.

It makes Halloween look like a nutritionists' convention.

Well, to sleep, perchance to dream, before someone wakes up coughing.