Celebrating the Entire Christmas Season in One Day

We’re in the full swing of the Christmas season around here, even without our traditional Christmas tree. The girls have been busy making Christmas presents and making their own lists. Brita’s comment to me was, “I’m making all of my Christmas presents this year because I’m using my money to buy things for myself.” I’m not sure if I should praise that attitude or not.

The girls are losing their focus in school and it’s making homework a big challenge. Brita told me I don’t need to remind her to do any of her homework because she wants to be responsible for it. As it turns out, I think she doesn’t want me pestering her with reminders to complete homework that she intends to procrastinate until she forgets about it. Even with the ongoing homework struggles we’ve had with Leah (it really bothers me that homework is an issue with a first grader), she has had a great attitude about school all year, so I was surprised when she started complaining. She was finally able to verbalize her frustrations when she said, “Do you know why I don’t like school? Because I don’t like phonograms and we can’t whistle. I love to whistle.”

Meg continues to be our little angel and we adore everything she does, even if she’s not real graceful about the way she does it. I’ve learned to offer meals to her in courses—veggies first. I wait until ALL of her vegetables are gone before showing her the next offering, because if she is in the process of eating her last pea or carrot and sees a more preferable food coming her way, she goes to the effort to spit out that pea or carrot and throw it on the floor. Is that cute, or is that supposed to be considered obnoxious? We go for “cute” around here.

Saturday was the let’s-cram-all-of-our-Christmas-celebrations-into-one-day day around here. We typically have one day each Christmas season that has lots of scheduling conflicts and we have to decide what to cut and what to participate in. This year, instead of cutting anything we decided to participate in a little bit of everything…because we could.

My day started out by running my first ever 5K (I’ll write more about that later), which resulted in my late appearance at the Ward Christmas Party brunch. We hurried home so Jared could do his moonlighting job, and he got home just in time to get ready for his work party. We rushed out the door, Leah in her pink summer “Christmas” attire, and made a quick appearance at the work party, giving ourselves just enough time to tackily enter and announce that we had to leave soon, so could we please break that awkward pre-party ice by dishing up our plates first so we have time to eat before we run? So embarrassing. But unfortunately we didn’t “run” soon enough and it was looking like I wasn’t going to be able to join the stake choir in “The Messiah” performance in Waco. I’ve only been driving to Waco every Sunday night for the past six weeks to practice and I was ready to bag the whole thing since we’d only given ourselves 30 minutes for the 40 minute drive. Jared insisted that we were going to make an effort to get there and he drove more aggressively than I’ve ever seen him drive before. He dropped me at the door with one minute to spare, and I walked in just in time to find a place in line as the choir was filing into the chapel. The performance turned out much better than any of us had anticipated, considering the fact that it was just a bunch of ward choirs jumbled together. The soloists and orchestra were top-notch and somehow the choir was magnified and I was so glad Jared didn’t throw in the towel just because we were cutting it close.

Saturday was such a busy, productive day that Sunday has turned out to be kind of a flop. Jared woke me up at 7:30 and as I was stretching, trying to encourage myself out of bed, I remembered I was supposed to attend Ward Welfare Meeting at 7:30. We left the house for church 10 minutes after church had started, and then I wondered if I was supposed to teach Primary today. I was. The day got off to a rough start and the afternoon is turning into a free-for-all around here due to parents who are too exhausted to do anything about it. I suppose that means tomorrow will be a big cleaning day for me. It just makes me grateful to be able to send the girls off to school so I can regain my composure and put the house back together again.