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Dec. 26th, 2008 12:01 pmI've had a weird, mixed up, interesting sort of Christmas.
Physically, this has been a crappy week, as I've had a bad head cold with tons of muccous all along, and gotten very little sleep several nights in a row, and also been either far too full, and/or crammed into my girdle thing every minute. Plus I just started my period today so I keep having sudden bouts of bloating and inexplicable bad moods.
Spiritually, I feel good that I'm sort of keeping on task - by reading the kids the birth story from Luke before we opened presents and eating Jesus' birthday cake with them at Aunt Laura's and continuing to do devotions and bible reading myself every morning. It's like I'm putting out all I should, but not taking in...I really, really miss being able to go to church on Christmas Eve and with this whole "My grandparents live in Lakeland now" thing it's totally logistically impossible if the family is going to get together. I am uneasy about how many things get prioritized before church on Christmas, everything from packing to wrapping to cleaning. And yet it's a hypocritical uneasiness.
Moving right along, "emotionally" has been quite the headache. This past Monday, my counseling session ended right in the midst of me uncovering some horrible repressed memories and opening a giant can of worms. It hasn't RUINED Christmas for me, but it's made for a draining lot of talk with Laura and Grant and more nightmares than I would like to have had this week. Plus some confusion about how to proceed with various things.
"Emotionally" has also included seeing my mother for the first time in a couple of months and having her be shockingly thin, and this after her barely making it to join us at the last minute, and trying to deal with the "my brother is 18 and completely unprepared for life and totally handicapped by family shit" situation, all with some "Pa has prostate cancer" thrown in and a sprinkling of "sister in law's fiancee might be cleaning out our house while we're safely out of town" (he wasn't, but some weird circumstances led us to worry about it when I'd like to have not).
And then with Grant, we've done a lot of driving up and down the state in separate vehicles, sleeping in separate hotel beds with toddlers, going to sleep at different times because he has work the next day, existing on opposite ends of the room with 15 other people between us. There've been a few nice connecting moments in between but also a "long uncomfortable talk" (we're doing great overall, it was just an isolated thing).
There have been Some Great Things. That were really and truly great. Which is what has made me dub this Christmas "mixed up and interesting" rather than "horrible" or something to that effect.
-I'm really satisfied with all of the gift giving we did, it was great to have the means to really give people relevant and awesome stuff tailored to them and I think we did a great job with it. For instance, Mindy's girls? Nadia is in a place right now, like a behavioral problem, mental health stabilizing place for kids, for 6 months or more. So I got her a couple of really cool paperbacks, a sketchbook and colored pencils, and a bracelet. Patrice, on the other hand, is left at Oma's house without her twin sister or anyone having time to do things with her much - so I got her an American Girl doll with the promise that we're taking her, along with Annie, to the American Girl meetings at Barnes and Noble for the next few months. She was thrilled, by the way :D And when we last visited my Nana and Pa, Pa had a "CD burning for Dummies" book, a bunch of cds and a headache, and couldn't get his music imported or burned or any-damn-thing. I got him an iPod. He was all about it. My brother's been wearing the wrong prescription glasses with a burn on one lens and no nose guard and I got him a Lens Crafters gift certificate. And so on.
-I had a lot of opportunity for talking with my sister. We talk A LOT all the time, but in this scatter brained Mommy-brain way that is constant interruptions and putting each other on hold and never remembering what we were just saying. It's really different to spend 5 hours in a vehicle with two sleeping kids in the back and go deep. I think it was really helpful.
-We pulled off a lot of great stuff with the kids. They all wore their fancy Christmas clothes to Bob Evans and then my Nana's house, wowing everybody, and then changed into Christmas pajamas for the ride home and opening presents the next day, which was so adorable. They played with my Uncle Steve a ton, gave Nana and Pa plenty of hugs. They loved the stuff they got up there, some things to the point of real joy and fascination, said Thank you a lot, we had a good easy breakfast of leftovers yesterday morning, back here at home, and then present opening - we got a tiny recliner of ours out as the "gift chair" for whoever was sitting in it, and for the first three little kids' turns in it, Grant took pictures, I passed things out, Aaron collected wrapping paper and Annie had scissors and was helping people open things.
It can get overwhelming, how much WORK everything is as an adult running the show... I mean really, between cookie crumbles, popcorn bits, pine needles and torn paper I've been vaccuming twice a day just to continuously find more ants and neverendingly still have a filthy carpet. Mess per se doesn't bother me too much, especially during the holidays, it's the Herculean effort to clean constantly just to avoid descending into full blown squalor, that wears me down - we loaded the dishwasher three times before we left for Lakeland the other day and still came home to a messy kitchen, for instance. It just doesn't end. And then because I spent an hour and a half putting together a drum set and my sister was wrapping our presents for us for hours and my husband was trying to keep everyone amused and book the hotel and get the oil changed, I don't know. I think I'd feel less neutral and more genuinely happy "if" all sorts of variables were shifted a bit. Perhaps if I were healthy, if my mother were doing better, if the counseling thing hadn't played out the way it had, if my hormones weren't conspiring against me.
*sigh*
The counseling thing is the big thing for sure.
I am completely certain my kids had a wonderful Christmas Eve, Christmas day, Christmas week in general. And watching them has been the major highlight. I have a lot of pictures and will be posting some soon.
Physically, this has been a crappy week, as I've had a bad head cold with tons of muccous all along, and gotten very little sleep several nights in a row, and also been either far too full, and/or crammed into my girdle thing every minute. Plus I just started my period today so I keep having sudden bouts of bloating and inexplicable bad moods.
Spiritually, I feel good that I'm sort of keeping on task - by reading the kids the birth story from Luke before we opened presents and eating Jesus' birthday cake with them at Aunt Laura's and continuing to do devotions and bible reading myself every morning. It's like I'm putting out all I should, but not taking in...I really, really miss being able to go to church on Christmas Eve and with this whole "My grandparents live in Lakeland now" thing it's totally logistically impossible if the family is going to get together. I am uneasy about how many things get prioritized before church on Christmas, everything from packing to wrapping to cleaning. And yet it's a hypocritical uneasiness.
Moving right along, "emotionally" has been quite the headache. This past Monday, my counseling session ended right in the midst of me uncovering some horrible repressed memories and opening a giant can of worms. It hasn't RUINED Christmas for me, but it's made for a draining lot of talk with Laura and Grant and more nightmares than I would like to have had this week. Plus some confusion about how to proceed with various things.
"Emotionally" has also included seeing my mother for the first time in a couple of months and having her be shockingly thin, and this after her barely making it to join us at the last minute, and trying to deal with the "my brother is 18 and completely unprepared for life and totally handicapped by family shit" situation, all with some "Pa has prostate cancer" thrown in and a sprinkling of "sister in law's fiancee might be cleaning out our house while we're safely out of town" (he wasn't, but some weird circumstances led us to worry about it when I'd like to have not).
And then with Grant, we've done a lot of driving up and down the state in separate vehicles, sleeping in separate hotel beds with toddlers, going to sleep at different times because he has work the next day, existing on opposite ends of the room with 15 other people between us. There've been a few nice connecting moments in between but also a "long uncomfortable talk" (we're doing great overall, it was just an isolated thing).
There have been Some Great Things. That were really and truly great. Which is what has made me dub this Christmas "mixed up and interesting" rather than "horrible" or something to that effect.
-I'm really satisfied with all of the gift giving we did, it was great to have the means to really give people relevant and awesome stuff tailored to them and I think we did a great job with it. For instance, Mindy's girls? Nadia is in a place right now, like a behavioral problem, mental health stabilizing place for kids, for 6 months or more. So I got her a couple of really cool paperbacks, a sketchbook and colored pencils, and a bracelet. Patrice, on the other hand, is left at Oma's house without her twin sister or anyone having time to do things with her much - so I got her an American Girl doll with the promise that we're taking her, along with Annie, to the American Girl meetings at Barnes and Noble for the next few months. She was thrilled, by the way :D And when we last visited my Nana and Pa, Pa had a "CD burning for Dummies" book, a bunch of cds and a headache, and couldn't get his music imported or burned or any-damn-thing. I got him an iPod. He was all about it. My brother's been wearing the wrong prescription glasses with a burn on one lens and no nose guard and I got him a Lens Crafters gift certificate. And so on.
-I had a lot of opportunity for talking with my sister. We talk A LOT all the time, but in this scatter brained Mommy-brain way that is constant interruptions and putting each other on hold and never remembering what we were just saying. It's really different to spend 5 hours in a vehicle with two sleeping kids in the back and go deep. I think it was really helpful.
-We pulled off a lot of great stuff with the kids. They all wore their fancy Christmas clothes to Bob Evans and then my Nana's house, wowing everybody, and then changed into Christmas pajamas for the ride home and opening presents the next day, which was so adorable. They played with my Uncle Steve a ton, gave Nana and Pa plenty of hugs. They loved the stuff they got up there, some things to the point of real joy and fascination, said Thank you a lot, we had a good easy breakfast of leftovers yesterday morning, back here at home, and then present opening - we got a tiny recliner of ours out as the "gift chair" for whoever was sitting in it, and for the first three little kids' turns in it, Grant took pictures, I passed things out, Aaron collected wrapping paper and Annie had scissors and was helping people open things.
It can get overwhelming, how much WORK everything is as an adult running the show... I mean really, between cookie crumbles, popcorn bits, pine needles and torn paper I've been vaccuming twice a day just to continuously find more ants and neverendingly still have a filthy carpet. Mess per se doesn't bother me too much, especially during the holidays, it's the Herculean effort to clean constantly just to avoid descending into full blown squalor, that wears me down - we loaded the dishwasher three times before we left for Lakeland the other day and still came home to a messy kitchen, for instance. It just doesn't end. And then because I spent an hour and a half putting together a drum set and my sister was wrapping our presents for us for hours and my husband was trying to keep everyone amused and book the hotel and get the oil changed, I don't know. I think I'd feel less neutral and more genuinely happy "if" all sorts of variables were shifted a bit. Perhaps if I were healthy, if my mother were doing better, if the counseling thing hadn't played out the way it had, if my hormones weren't conspiring against me.
*sigh*
The counseling thing is the big thing for sure.
I am completely certain my kids had a wonderful Christmas Eve, Christmas day, Christmas week in general. And watching them has been the major highlight. I have a lot of pictures and will be posting some soon.
