The Search for Miss Direction: Between a Rock and a Hard Place

Thursday, December 19, 2013

Between a Rock and a Hard Place

I love Christmas time. I love the feeling, the sights, the sounds, the anticipation, the music, the joy, even the hustle and bustle to some degree. But this past week (and still the next few days) has been absolutely nutso. Between the Bean's behavior issues last week, her birthday, Gary being in town, snow messing up plans, the Christmas program, hanging out with friends, PTA, MOPS, getting everything ready to head out, packed, wrapped, last minute gifts bought/made, work, and everything else that has been going on, it's starting to catch up to me. I want to enjoy the season but it's getting lost in all the other junk. Anyone else finding themselves overwhelmed this week? Any tips to combat it? I have to admit I'm kind of counting down the hours to Saturday night when I get back to Farmington, with the kids happily spending time in the 'Mont for a few days where I have absolutely NOTHING on my calendar. Rumor has it that we're to get quite the snow storm on Sunday so that even if I wanted to run around the like crazy I won't be able to :) Two days of slowing down before jumping into Christmas in the 'Mont and then having company next weekend is sounding very enticing indeed.

In the meantime, as Dory would say "Just keep swimming" or as I was so nicely told earlier today "Suck it up and deal." Sounds like a plan! And while I could have been upset or defensive about that, they have a point. Wallowing in feeling overwhelmed is just going to make it worse. So one foot in front of the other and enjoy every moment for what it is.

Which makes me exceedingly happy that I didn't give in to the temptation to bail on our plans for the evening; pizza and hanging out with some of my faves, the Kennedy's! With the boys at different schools at different times it has been tough to be able to get them together to play so we had decided to try tonight since Phil was out of town and Jen's been flying solo for the week. This morning after a disasterous MOPS meeting that I dashed out of (long story...) I was strongly considering cancelling. Wasn't sure I was up for one more thing today. But Jen and her amazing twosome, as usual, made me glad that we stuck it out. It was very low key but still a blast. I'm so thankful to have them as part of our lives here.

And in completely unrelated, but extremely important since we are down to the last 10 'food celebrations' (holy cow, can't believe I've done this!) Happy National Hard Candy Day! I don't have much luck making candy and there is a certain kind of hard candy that screams Christmas to me (and makes me think of being at Papa Kosakowski's house on Christmas Eve) that I knew would more than cover our celebration today. Plus I 'invented' some pretty neat Candy Cane rice krispy treats yesterday to take to MOPS this morning, so that counts too, right?

Alright, tomorrow's gonna be another day. Still hammering out some of the details, but I know for sure we're doing Muppet Christmas Carol with the Janoch's tomorrow night :) And I've got to spend my day getting laundry done and the kiddos packed up so we can leave bright and early Saturday morning. So until then...