Friday, December 21, 2007

regarding Christmas cards

Great Scott, it's December 21st and I'm just now starting to think about this.

You see, I have this self-imposed pressure to yearly come up with a witty, newsy newsletter of all the O family doings for the previous year. People have commented to me in past years about how clever/funny/charming the Christmas letter was. However, this year I have discovered that I am only sporadically clever, occasionally funny, and infrequently charming.

Plus them there card things ain't cheap to buy OR send.


So this afternoon, having an extended period to sit at the desktop computer (ooh, the one with a PRINTER), I made an unclever, nonfunny, semi-charming (if snowflakes are your thing)... POSTCARD, with absolutely no family news on it. A simple "Merry Christmas," with John 1:14.

And what is more, I am not sending it to everyone on my list. Simplify, simplify. Please don't feel snubbed. If you're reading this, I probably keep in contact with you more than the other people on my list. Rest assured, I am thinking of you. And you probably already know all the news I would share anyway, because you read this thing.

A simple "Merry Christmas" to you all.

John 1:14 - "And the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us; and we beheld His glory, the glory as of the only begotten of the Father, full of grace and truth."

Thursday, December 20, 2007

sowing and reaping

What do you get when you combine a cup of hot cocoa and a thermometer?

A little girl with a 101.1 fever who is too sick to do school, watching Ratatouille and Felicity, An American Girl on the mini DVD player, while being pampered by all and sundry.

I wondered, later, as to why her temperature suddenly became 98.6. An angel must have touched her on the head and said "go out and play."

So, now that it's 8:30 pm, confession has been made, discipline has been meted out, and she is now doing her school, and will stay up until it is done.

And the letter "c" is growing increasingly difficult to type on my laptop. What would the world be like without the letter c?

Thursday, December 06, 2007

sage advice

from my son, who spent yesterday recovering from stomach flu:

"Mom....bananas and quesadillas do not mix."

Wednesday, December 05, 2007

from one adventure to the next

Tuesday was the usual whirlwind of activity: get the kid ready for school and out the door to band; sit on the second kid to make sure she did some work while first kid was at band; sit on both kids to make sure they got their school completed...

Interrupting this was the weekly trip to the library. Usually the kids blithely go their way with dad, no mean mom coming along. But right now in Composition studies we are working on The Report. So mean mom joined said children at the library today. The textbook discussed card catalogues (what library still has those?!) as well as computer catalogues - so off we went to the library computer to find references for their chosen topics: S wants to do a report on baseball; D wants to do something involving cartooning, Jim Davis, and Garfield.

I had to leave them there to finish up checking out sources and references in order to teach piano. They arrived home as blithely as they left - no sources checked out. They "forgot."

After teaching, I had a meeting for choir to do some admin restructuring. We're in the market for a new director. Any offers? :) At the conclusion of the meeting, the soprano section leader backed out of the driveway, but missed the turn at the end and sank up to her axles in mud/grass the consistency of bread pudding. So I and two other men were up past the ankles in mud getting this dear woman out of the field and back to Tacoma. By this time it was 10 p.m!

Came home, cleaned up, bathed - went straight to bed. A tapping at the door awoke me. S entered to inform us that D had just thrown up. Clock time: 1:12 am. Always, ALWAYS, these things happen when the entire world is asleep, except yourself! I told A to stay in bed and went to assess the damage. (Here comes the TMI part, so you can stop here if you want. This is my therapy; I don't want to be responsible for yours.)

The kid perfectly targeted an inside corner between the bathroom and the linen closet, nailed the bathroom door and doorknob (apparently it was shut as he made his frantic dash), and finished the bulk of the event immediately inside the door on the linoleum. Oh, and a little bit in the intended receptacle.

Notice the time of this post? :) My therapy. Got things scraped up, mopped up, saved the carpet, wiped and washed walls, doors, baseboards and knobs several times (paranoia; MUST DO THIS AGAIN...and again...yet again...) and in general used enough good-smelling detergents and cleansers to eradicate the smell. But I still smell it. Coincidence? Maybe.

The boy told me he was feeling fine now. I popped him into the tub and left him there while I did my work. I finally realized the poor child was too embarrassed to get out of the tub while I was there, but he was too polite to ask me to look the other way, and too tired to stay in the tub. I'm not the quickest on the draw, especially at the disadvantage of two hours of sleep. So the boy, armed with bowl this time, is back in his bed, dry, unsmelly, and warm-- hopefully to sleep the remainder of the night.

The clock just chimed two. Maybe I can relax enough to go back to bed and get some sleep myself.