Still here...

Can you tell it's the week before Christmas?  Sorry for the silence.  My nights have been filled with online shopping and actual work-work, and you'd think staying up until midnight or (gasp) 1am would give me time to blog, but no...Christmas alone is plenty of work.  I'm exhausted and still sick.  I've had some form of cold symptoms for over a month, starting with the body aches and chills, then the cough shortly thereafter.  The cough eased up by Thanksgiving, but over the course of that weekend at the funeral home, I started feeling cruddy again.  Just general congestion and a touch of sore throat initially, with a return to the cough because of the congestion, which has been mostly in the form of mucus in my throat.  Then I got the pinkeye last week, which went away by Monday but has been trying to come back for a few days now.  My throat has been very sore for a week now, and the only thing that takes the edge off is Mucinex, which I think breaks up the mucus and makes the inflammation a bit less.  It's really starting to beat me down.  I called for more eye drops yesterday and the sore throat was so bad by the evening that I went to urgent care after Carter went to bed.  I thought it might be strep, but no, just an upper respiratory infection.  Viral, of course.  Lots of co-pays later I have a few things to ease up the symptoms, but we'll see how things go.

We have a handful of gifts to get, and a lacrosse doubleheader for Jacob today.  I haven't quite figured out how to fit it all in AND bake AND wrap, but somehow it will all get done.  Just a matter of whether we try to cram a lot of things into Tuesday, or allow ourselves a pleasant Christmas Eve morning at home to open gifts.  Jacob is definitely excited, and while Carter is not a fan of Santa just yet, when I asked him this morning what he wanted Santa to bring him, his answer made me smile.  Something tells me he'll be a happy boy when he opens his big present!

Wednesday we got to visit Jacob's school and watch the first graders' March of the Toy Soldiers.  It's a 30-year-old tradition at the school, apparently.  All of the first graders marched to two classical music pieces about toy soldiers and they did great with their marching and the straight faces they needed to maintain.  Here's a clip of it.  Jacob is in the first batch of kids.  Also, if you go to the last 30 seconds or so, you'll also see when the Kindergartners made a cameo as the "mice" that the soldiers are not rattled by (per the story we heard prior to the march).



Here is Jacob's whole class afterward.  He's 4th from the right in the back.

He was so cute with his makeup and his cool hat.  The diamond on the front was a family crest he had to create with the letter "R".  It was carved into a piece of thin metallic stuff (heavy tin foil, maybe?).

I brought him home with me afterward and just worked from home, but before that I had to see his gingerbread house he created in class on Monday.  Luckily, the gluten-free graham crackers worked okay, and he was very proud of it.

I had Thursday off, mostly to get a few Christmas things done and then grab the kids and head off to Craig's work Christmas party, our annual trip to the casino in Niagara Falls.  I had a productive morning, ordering a few things online, picking up a couple pre-ordered gifts, and finding a few more things I needed.  The afternoon before the party always gets hectic because I need to pack up, grab the boys, and drive to Buffalo, then drop them at my parents' and meet Craig at the party.  This year I added in a trip to my parents' Walmart to pick up a couple more gifts I had ordered (knowing I'd be there before Christmas).  The party was fun--great food, good company (including the Sabres' head coach, Ted Nolan, who's also a Knighthawks advisor), and good enough gambling!  It was a late night, though, which in the midst of so many other late nights lately was not ideal, but it was worth it. 

Have I mentioned yet that Carter is not a fan of Santa?  Well, actually, he thinks Santa is cool...unless he's 10 feet away.  He will point to Santa in books and on TV and say, "Santa!" over and over again.  But when we get anywhere near a real one, he freaks out.  A couple weeks ago we stopped at an event at Jacob's school (we had to miss most of it because of his Sunday School Christmas program practice), and Jacob got there just in time to see Santa.  As he went up to see him, Carter started crying.  He was shaking and everything!  I don't know if he thought Santa was going to hurt Jacob, or what.  Last night we were at Wegmans, and one the way in we saw a very cool Coca-Cola truck...

Looking at the back of the truck from behind the cart racks

The sides of the truck were completely illuminated, the whole tractor trailer was outlined in lights, and the circle on the back and picture on the side were pictures of Santa.  When we got inside, we found out that Santa was in the store.  We walked over on our way out, and I was hoping that two extra weeks of Santa propaganda might have convinced Carter to like him, but no...instantly the kid that waves and says "hi" to everyone in the store buried his face in the shopping cart handle and whimpered.  Ok, guess not.  He'll be seeing Santa at daycare on Monday and I'm hoping that the lure of a present will help him be brave!

We're getting there, though.  We have a few presents under our tree (not ones I've wrapped, mind you--that's next on my list), I'm pleased with our decorations, cookies will hopefully get baked tomorrow, and once we get a few more gifts, we'll be in good shape to be ready in time.  That last one is a big "if", however.  Schedules are tight and it's always a crunch.  But we will get there.

Off to wrap now...well, once I clean off my dining room table...again.