The Day That Disappeared

Every time I decide to abandon routine and be a bit spontaneous, it comes back to bite me. Always. Without fail. Which explains why my entire day yesterday evaporated when I spontaneously decided to go to a friend's house and learn how to make pierogies... By the time I brought the dough and filling home and finished assembling them, it was 5 PM and I realized I had nothing else for dinner; so we ate the pierogies for the first night of Chanukah instead of saving them for Christmas Eve as planned.

I figure I'll make latkes on Christmas Eve, just to complete my poor children's interfaith confusion. Then we'll hang up our stockings, play some Dreidel by the fire, leave jelly doughnuts out for Santa, and go to sleep with visions of Chanukah gelt dancing in our heads. In fact, this approach might be more appropriate than I have heretofore realized, if this news report is at all reliable. (If you're Jewish, click on that - it's funny.)

Susie (aka the preschooler-formerly-known-as-pottytrained) has once again spent her entire day peeing and pooping in her clothes. I swear, she thinks it's a hobby. I asked her why she no longer sits on the potty (because, yes, I am an idiot and think I can get a reasonable answer to that question) and she said, with a shrug, "I just gave up."

Apparently, she's okay with that.

Take Back The Holidays

You wanna know how I'm feeling? Screw Christmas. Screw Chanukah, too. Folks, I've come to realize that the holiday-tradition bar has been set way too high for a mere mortal like myself. Really. Game over. Holidays are supposed to be fun, remember?

I hereby resolve to:

1. Quit the church Christmas pageant. Rachel and Brian no longer want to participate. And I never really wanted to be in charge of Angels (Group 1) anyway. Screw it.

2. Forget the house. It will never be any cleaner than it is now. Screw that, too.

3. Buy a Christmas tree at Home Depot. Unless you're tramping out into the snowy woods and cutting down your own wild tree, it ain't traditional. Don't freeze your butts off at a Christmas tree farm - don't you realize that's where the trees at Home Depot come from? And they're cheaper at the store, too. Duh.

4. Summon all the kids into the (messy) living room, plop them down on the couch without regard to size/age order, and snap a picture. No matching clothes, no neatly combed hair, nothing. Reality photo cards, folks - they're all the rage.

5. Our second annual New Year's Party? Still on. Anyone who doesn't appreciate pre-made guacamole from Trader Joe's and Hebrew National frozen hotdogs in biscuit dough can just stay home. I'll heat up the hotdogs, though. Maybe.

6. Fancy Christmas dinner? Why? We just had turkey and stuffing on Thanksgiving, right? Have it more than once a year and no one will appreciate it. I think we'll just have cookies and candy canes that day, thanks. That's all the kids really want, anyway.


7. My holiday table will most emphatically not look like the picture above. I have nothing against beautiful, holiday-themed quilted table runners with matching Christmas china and (gasp!) napkins all the same color. In fact, I admire people who set their tables this way. But I have come to accept that such a layout is not within my capability to pull off. Ever.



8. Meaningful, appropriate gift-giving is now banned. I'm giving people whatever is convenient. A beer-bottle opener for the 6-year-old? Why not? Apparently, she likes beer. 5 homemade scarves to be divided among 10 people? Hey - half of the recipients probably don't even want a dorky-looking handknit muffler, anyway. I'm thinking this could be a lot of fun. Stay tuned for gift-giving ideas for and from the teen set.




9. Latkes for Chanukah? I'm using the mix, straight from the box. I'd use frozen, but those taste really bad. Chanukah gifts? Cold, hard cash - er, I mean, gelt. Chanukah gelt. And dreidels? They're around here somewhere - Lord knows, I'm always running across one in the silverware drawer or on a bookshelf until the day before Chanukah, when they all magically disappear until January.

10. Hah! Screw it. I can't think of #10, and Theo wants the computer to fill out college applications or some such nonsense. Can't he see I'm blogging?

Fellow holiday slackers, feel free to share your own resolutions in the comments. No Martha Stewart wanna-be's allowed. This site is for Christmas/Chanukah slackers only. Got it? Good.

Cannot Think Of Title To Save My Life

Never did get those packages mailed. But they're not eaten either. So that's good. I think I'll send Larry to the post office with them tomorrow. He'll enjoy the relative peace and quiet there.

Today we were expecting dinner guests for Chanukah, which meant it was time for Larry to start yet another home improvement project. He decided today was as good a time as ever to climb up to the roof and nail the gutters back into the side of the house. The job took a while, since Larry decided that, as long as he was up there, he should clean the leaves out of the gutters also. He stopped short of reshingling the roof, but I know he thought about it. Meanwhile I spent the day cleaning the house by hiding all our extra crap (including those unmailed packages of cookies and fudge) in our bedroom and trying to cook a decent dinner.

Theo escaped the chaos we call home to go to his training session at the bookstore. He watched many scintillating videos instructing him on the finer points of customer service. He also learned how to subtly thwart shoplifters (i.e., without punching them in the gut and sitting on them until security arrives). Even though he was paid for the ordeal, Theo was not very inspired by the experience of sitting through badly-acted, corporate training films. I can't really blame him, as I still remember the films shown to me when I started working the Christmas rush at a department store 20 years ago: "World War II, and JCPenneys was there," the voiceover solemnly intoned. Now that's a company that takes itself pretty seriously.

We found some more stolen money on Rachel's dresser. Granted, she's only 5; but this proclivity towards larceny worries me. I don't know whether we should even bother to look at colleges for her, or just shop for the best prison instead. At least we won't have to worry about her SAT scores.

Susie likes Skittles. She ate many of them this evening, while the other kids gambled theirs in a game of dreidel. In fact, she ate so many, I'll betcha she's going to have colored poop in the morning. Who says nothing exciting ever happens around here?

Anna, that's who.

Sleep Deprivation and Spousal Alienation

Well, I was going to take a day off today; but I've become addicted to watching the numbers on my sitemeter creep up after I post, and I just can't stop.

Today went fairly well, considering I had 3 hours of sleep last night (and not consecutive, either). David kept waking up barking, so I put on 2 coats and wrapped him in 3 blankets and opened the living room window and let him breathe in the blessedly cold, dry air. Larry came down at one point (no doubt motivated by my hissing at him, "How come I'm always the one getting up?") and, thinking that David needed a hat, placed his own rabbit-fur hat on David's cold head. This maneuver upset our little vegetarian very much, even though no flesh-eating was involved (on our parts, anyway). So we went with wool instead, the shearing of which (we assured David) in no way hurt the sheep, aside from perhaps leaving it a tad chilly in the evenings for a week or two. This conversation seemed a bit surreal at 2 in the morning, but we're used to things being rather weird around here.

So now I'm waiting for the rest of us to come down with the sore throat from hell just in time for our annual Chanukah party. Theo has cooked us up about 75 latkes, which better be enough, because I am sick of cleaning up the greasy post-frying mess. We've got the life-or-death homemade applesauce from last fall, the dreidels (an important detail - the year we spent in Rhode Island, I had to crash a Chanukah party at a local synagogue and beg for a dreidel), the pennies to gamble with, the candles, and the Chanukah napkins. Gotta have the Chanukah napkins. I would have splurged and gotten the plates also, but the stores were sold out. Hot item, those plates.

Maybe I should clean up the house, too. And paint some more gray stripes on the living room wall, just to confuse people. Larry went out and bought a non-returnable 5-gallon pail of the paint color we had tentatively (and I cannot stress tentatively enough here) agreed upon for the living room. And now the color (or at least the stripes of color) look not quite right to me. More blue than grey. Maybe a bit too light. I tried to express my misgivings to him, but all he could do was to shake his head and mutter something about 200 dollars.

So....I am going to shut my mouth and let him paint the whole stupid room with the wrong color and when he is not looking I am going to smear the color I want, the right color, the color that doesn't look blue, on top of it. Because trying to talk about this problem would not be good for our marriage. I am confident that Larry will eventually come around to the point of view that my happiness is worth a heck of a lot more than 200 lousy bucks.

I don't know how many years of marriage it takes to make 2 immature people grow up, but it is definitely more than 17.

Good night!

Cookies and Dreidels and Chores, Oh My!

We made fudge today. Peanut butter-chocolate chip cookies yesterday. Lemon bars tomorrow. Maybe we'll throw some steaming cups of cocoa in there for good measure. I'm glad I was smart enough to put off returning to Weight Watchers until January. I don't care how much I have to starve myself for 10 months a year, as long as I can have my holiday goodies.

Because it's holiday time - time for the children to fight over which color candles to put in the menorah, which wooden tree ornament to decorate with markers and glitter glue, which bowl they get to lick. Next week, they'll fight over who wraps which present. Yes, indeed, it's a magical time of the year - magical in that, somehow, I manage not to kill them. Now they're throwing dreidels at each other and screaming. I don't know why. And I don't care.

Larry (with great trepidation) informed me that the tile guy (for the kitchen floor, remember?) isn't showing up this Sunday, after all; but he will definitely be here the 14th. Yeah, I believe that one. I think I have more of a chance of Santa actually showing up here than that guy.

Hey, do you think Santa does floors? Or maybe one of his elves? That would be so cool, wouldn't it? I believe in you, Santa, I believe! I'm not like that cold-hearted chick in Miracle on 34th Street. And, hey, we left you some very nice beer last year, to wash down those cookies with. Yeah, the John Adams Christmas Ale....nice stuff, wasn't it? Well, there's more where that came from, if you know what I mean (wink, wink). And I've been a really good girl all year. Though, if you prefer naughty, I can do that too....

I can't believe I typed that. Coal in my stocking this year, for sure....

Larry is out this evening with David at Cub Scouts. David doesn't like Cub Scouts, but he looks cute in the shirt. That's good enough for me. So, anyway, I get to put everyone to bed tonight and do all the dishes and as soon as I'm done goofing off here I'm going to clean the stove. Yup, just another exciting Tuesday evening here in our household. And Anna is mad at me because I just told her that I'm not going to Target this evening. If she had done those dishes for me, I might have considered taking her, you know. Maybe I should offer to let her scrub the stovetop. I bet she'd like that.

My Brain Is Empty

Today I got more visitors to this site than I ever have before. Which means, I'm more popular when I don't post....I think. Oh, well.

Nothing of note happened today. Anna was pleasant (well, that is somewhat remarkable, now isn't it?), Theo made latkes, Rachel fell asleep before dinner, Susie wet my bed (as usual) because I forgot to put her diaper on her (as usual), and David had fun flying a kite he made out of fishing line and a plastic grocery bag (it was a tad windy here today). He looked rather pathetic, like a poster child for a Toys for Tots campaign.

I'm starting on my annual schizo December breakdown - what with Chanukah, St. Nicholas Day, Chanukah, Christmas pageants and parties, flute recitals, Chanukah (some holidays overstay their welcome), Christmas tree decorating, and gingerbread house construction, I turn into a snarling, Grinch-type creature by the morning of the 25th. It ain't pretty. When did the holidays turn into an endurance test, anyway?

No funnies here tonight, folks. Too tired. Go on over to humor-blogs.com for some laughs instead. Tell 'em I sent ya.

Thanks A Lot, Pilgrims!

Okay, time to quit supposing. It's not 20 years ago, we all have Thanksgiving dinners to prepare, and why am I wasting time in the blogosphere right now, anyway? Probably because I have a Thanksgiving dinner to prepare, but I don't know who's coming. We always wait until the last minute and invite whoever's alone (I mean, people that we know - not perfect strangers) to come eat. Those are the only people who might want to share their holiday with a teenage girl casting death glares at everyone, a whining 5-year-old, a spoiled 2-year-old girl (who's cute as a button, but loud), a 10-year-old vegetarian who nags people not to let their turkey touch his plate, and a 7-year-old boy who has just learned to burp at the table. And even then, the anticipated guest sometimes turns us down, thinking that one of those Swanson frozen dinners in the peace and quiet of his own home will do him just fine. In other words, we only get the truly desperate.

Thanksgiving just ain't what it used to be.

But that's okay, it will be over soon. And then there's Chanukah, because my side of the family's Jewish. Luckily, Theo likes to fry up potato latkes (anything to avoid doing his Chemistry homework); but I still need to locate the dreidels, the menorah, the candles, the Chanukah tablecloth - all of which (in an unfallen world) would be located in a box marked, well, Chanukah. But they aren't. And then I have to make the life-or-death decision of whether or not I can use the homemade applesauce from last year as a side for the latkes. Would you like your holiday celebration tainted with the risk of botulism, or no? It would certainly add a certain frisson of excitement to our party, I'm sure - like Russian Roulette, only more fatal.

And then, because I wasn't smart enough to marry within my faith and keep my life simple, we have Christmas. Throw in 2 flute recitals, the church Christmas pageant, and the New Year's Neighborhood Open House that I told everyone I was hosting, and things start getting a bit crazed around here. Because I'm expected to keep all my regular balls that I juggle up in the air while I take care of these extras.

But, I did manage to order the Christmas photocards, a task which was time consuming, folks, in the way, say, that evolution is time consuming. No matter that I have well over 2000 digital photos online for this past year. I had to find the right combo of four photos to show off each kid, plus I had to find a template which will offend neither side of the family (Christian and Jewish, remember? Thank Allah there are no Muslims to deal with), plus I had to make myriad other decisions (20 or 40? Photo or Stationery Paper? Express Ship? Text of Greeting?). In short, Larry found me actually sobbing at the keyboard at 10 last night, unable to navigate my way through the maze of choices being offered to me. He had to take over.

(Silver lining - I got to use a line from Casablanca: "Oh, I don't know what's right anymore," I said, in my best Ingrid Bergman voice. "You'll have to do the thinking for both of us.")

So that's done. And I remembered to start defrosting the turkey. What's up with all those weird safety instructions for thawing out old Tom, anyway? If cooking him for 5 hours doesn't kill whatever's dangerous, I don't think it matters how you defrost it. And no one's died yet. That's why I don't serve the applesauce at Thanksgiving - if someone did die, we wouldn't know which poisonous foodstuff to blame.

Hmm...getting a little morbid for the holidays, aren't we? Time to sign off - tomorrow's baking day and I need to defrost the pumpkin for the pies. (Just had to slip that hyperlink in there - it makes me feel so blog-savvy.)