here comes christmas, ready or not.

Well, my christmas tree is not up and I've done almost no shopping. How did it come to this? And now anxiety has gripped my throat so that I can't breathe deeply. It seems I believed making graham cracker houses and chocolate dipped pretzels and cut out cookies were more important holiday activities than shopping. Which, come to think of it, they are. Except now it's December 21st and in 4 days I still have to have gifts for kids and parents and in-laws. Cousins and nieces are simply going to have to receive their boxes after the holiday. Same for the video card I'll be sending out electronically..... there's no way for holiday cards to find themselves done and addressed and mailed. A simple impossibility. Perhaps I'm learning to acknowledge my limitations.

I hope I have pictures of the projects we've been doing. One of my favorites is the outdoor ornaments Frances and I made the other day. The idea came from this blog, and they used cranberries; I didn't have cranberries, and getting to the grocery is yet another activity that's falling off my list, so I used limes which are green and celebratory, I figured. I did use the Artful Parent's learning curve--for example, I put one lime slice in the muffin tin and then water just to cover it. I froze those for a while, then added the yarn and another lime slice, then water to the top, then froze all. Don't they look lovely?

Note that I said Frances and I did this project; I've started to leave Clark out of some of these activities, and without much guilt. He was part of the graham cracker houses (in retrospect, I should have just bought the damn gingerbread house kit since I was not going to commit to baking the gingerbread myself. The graham cracker houses were not as easy as I expected) but I spent a good bit of time saying, "Clark, sit down. Please stop shaking the table. Okay, only one more piece of candy. Don't sit on the table, Clark. In your chair. Could you please stop moving for a moment?!" Man, he makes me nutso sometimes. Constantly in motion, constant activity, constant throwing of things. Constant, constant. In the end I just released him: "Clark, go. Go play over there. Legos. You want legos?" and I finished his house.

Good enough parenting. That's the aim, remember?