Goodness gracious, is it ever slow around here!

Julian fell asleep on the couch while watching a DVD of Mr. Dress-Up before I even got around to cleaning and vacuuming the living room, let alone before I could herald him to the kitchen for lunch. I’m sure I don’t need to tell you that his early nap is not good. I think it’s due, in part, to the recent time change. That’s one thing they don’t tell you about motherhood… “falling back” will never be glorious again as we do not gain an hour, actually we lose one, because it just means that the little people are up an hour earlier. And he’s been a little mixed up and extra high strung the last few days which tends to lead to him taking “time outs” on his own. I think this “time out”, after an impromptu visit from Granny, accidentally turned into a snooze.

Any change in Julian’s schedule will cause upheaval, to varying degrees, even if he is the one who caused the change in the first place. If he misses his nap, all hell will break lose eventually. If his naptime is changed he’ll be really disoriented and skittish and will lose some of his verbal skills and rely instead on echolalia that doesn’t always make sense to those of us around him. Like I said, any change in his daytime routine…

So, yeah…this is not good. But what is a Momma to do?

Enjoy the calm while it lasts, that’s what.

I have been plugging through my creepy Christmas book. It is far less creepy and now is just really corny.

I have eaten far too many mini chocolate bars (didn’t I vow to stop that?!) from the black cauldron on the top of the fridge. My kids have gotten sick of their treats. I know, they’re crazy. There is a puke bowl full, absolutely FULL, of little bags of chips and cheezies and the cauldron is still packed to the brim with chocolate bars and gummies and lollipops and various candies. They don’t want any of it. Ever. I tried to pack a chocolate bar and a bag of chips in Olivia’s lunch this morning and she stopped me! Whose children are they?! So that means that nobody is watching and counting and I tend to have a nibble or six while I’m reading. Bad girl, I know.

I have tried, without success, to get onto facebook and * stay * on facebook, at least long enough to post a status update, check on other status updates and e-mail Amy who last heard from me while I was in exhausted/hysterical mode. But I can’t do it. I am unable to do anything on facebook which only serves to annoy and frustrate me. I have little patience when it comes to the computer. I tend to get way more worked up than necessary. Then I just shut it off for a few days. Which makes me wonder why I’m paying for Internet anyway…

I have sat outside, basking in the sunshine and enjoying the silence of the afternoon. Our weather has been amazing this week. Lots and lots of sun, mild temperatures, and no dampness or precipitation. Glorious weather, really, especially for November. It’s easy to forget what month it is with weather like this and I’m trying to soak up every bit of it, as snow and winter is surely on this weather’s heels.

I have watched out my window for the mail lady, Theresa. She went by but didn’t stop. No mail for me today. This also frustrates me because I’m expecting a little bit of moola in the mail soon and I need that money to start any kind of Christmas shopping. Didn’t I vow to do that, too? Guess I haven’t stopped shoving my face full of chocolate long enough to remember to start Christmas shopping. Troy is supposed to be here tonight (I’m not holding my breath…I never do…but the last thing he said to me on Sunday was, “I’ll see you Wednesday afternoon”) and it would have been nice to use the alone time to get a start on the Santa shopping.

Not that any of my kids believe in Santa.

Olivia stopped believing the traditional way…some dickhead kid on her bus told her. She was pretty much devastated but the dickhead made such a good case for the parents that she couldn’t hang onto the belief any longer. It took her weeks to wrap her head around having been duped for so long until I eventually told her that if she wanted to believe in him, she could. I wouldn’t do anything differently, I wouldn’t say anything about him, yadda, yadda, yadda. But of course, it wasn’t the same. Then she kinda got into not believing because it meant she could tell me what she wanted and help me shop for the other kids, etc. It also gave her some closure because her first Christmas after Troy and I separated, she thought she had been bad and Santa was punishing her. Yeah. Her Dad kinda dropped the present ball that year (they spent the first Christmas with their father). So knowing it was her Dad and not Santa made the kid feel better.

Erica never really believed, if you want to know the Dog’s honest truth. She never really bought it. And when she considered it, he just scared the shit out of her. Some dude coming into her house while she was sleeping…when you think of it that way, it IS pretty fucking scary, isn’t it? Anyway, if we talked about Santa coming, she would just cry and cry and say she didn’t want anything because she didn’t want Santa coming into her house. She was relieved and gloated slightly when she found out the truth. Like I said, she never really believed in him.

And Julian. Julian has never believed, would never have believed. Concrete, literal thinker, he is. I can remember driving home one afternoon after Christmas and passing a hotel that had taken down it’s outdoor Christmas decorations. Julian asked over and over again where they went and our passenger in the car kept saying, “They went back to the North Pole buddy”. Julian was * hysterical * until I said, “they put Santa and the reindeer back in the basement”. Then he shut up, satisfied, finally. It’s tricky enough getting Julian to understand the abstract concept of Christmas (like Halloween), there’s really no point in trying to convince him about some dude he’s never met, who lives in the North Pole with reindeer that can fly, sliding down his chimney on Christmas Eve to put presents under the tree, never mind convincing him that it will happen to every little boy and girl in the same night, ONLY to eventually tell him the truth anyway, which would confuse him tenfold. Julian likes things that make sense. Santa is lots of things, but making sense he is not.

A lot of people have told me that they think it’s sad that none of my children believe in the Big Guy in Red but I’ve come to think of it as a good thing. They know who took the time to shop for them, who saved their money for their presents, and who loves them enough to give to them each year…it makes them appreciate their gifts more, I think, and it has made Christmas morning a lot less about what they got and more about being thankful for what they have. If anything, after Olivia got over the shock, it was replaced by a new shock, as she asked, “How can you afford all that stuff?!” ‘Nuff said.

And now the same sun that I was basking in is blinding me from my bedroom window. I have to hunch down to allow the monitor to block it’s glare. So that must be my cue to shut up and post this.