If your kids haven’t played with moon sand before, and you decide to try this, be warned: the stuff is pretty messy.  Put them outside, or on the garage floor, or something — the sand goes everywhere. That said, my stepkids (5, 11, and 12) and my nephew and niece (5 and 3) love the stuff.  I might have been known to clump along a bit in my time, too…

So, of course, the door to our room flew open at 5 minutes to six this morning, the lights went on, and there stodd my step-daughter in all her expectant glory.  “Come on, it’s Christmas Eve morning!”

“So?” I muttered.

“Time to open presents!” she declared.

“Mmmph…”

She did not leave at this point.

“You don’t open presents on Christmas Eve morning,” I tried to explain.

She wasn’t buying it.  I mean, today is clearly Christmas Eve, and those packages are clearly marked “Christmas Eve presents”.

“No, we open those tonight,” I insisted.  “Christmas Eve,get it? Eve as in evening. See?”

The door closed, slowly, piteously.  Maybe even a little menacingly?  Her saddened footsteps slowly faded into the distance. The dreams of Christmas Eve morn faded from the world, and the Long Wait began. I admire the ingenuity — she believed she had discovered the loophole that generations of children have sought, the technicality that would make Christmas come just a little bit earlier.

Alas, it wasn’t so, but I do hope she keeps trying.  Maybe she’ll figure it out — and in any case, it’s great preparation for law school!

Happy Holidays!

Be nice to everyone, even the people who seem “below” you. What goes around comes around, and thus the more kindness you share with others, the more it will come back to you. Reject any urge to belittle or be snarky towards others and find ways to compliment them and lift them up. If you take a moment to lift the spirit of someone and do it regularly, it will come back to you in some way that you likely cannot foresee.

Thanks, Trent!

We don’t give the kids much of an allowance, and usually they haven’t worried too much about Christmas and birthday gifts, especially for each other. Mom or I might get something made at school, or whipped together at home when we weren’t around, but brother or sister hasn’t gotten anything. With the older ones pushing into their teen years (12 and 11; I’m sorry, I mean 12 1/2 and 11 1/3!) I thought it would be a good idea for them to get each other something for Christmas, and something for their 5-year old brother, too.

Don’t get me wrong — I’m a little nervous about starting them in on the consumerist aspects of Christmas. But we don’t take them shopping much, and both of the older kids are pretty good about keeping their “wants” in line with their “haves” (that is, they dream about PlayStation 3’s and shark aquariums, but they’re pretty happy with what they already have, which is surprisingly little for kids in a family that isn’t rich, but certainly isn’t poor). So birthdays and Christmas are really the only times of the year when they get new stuff, and that doesn’t seem too overbalanced towards consumption.

Anyway, here’s the plan: take them to the mall or something, give them each $40, one goes with me, the other with mom, and let them pick out gifts for a) mom, b) me, c) the brother/sister with the other parent, d) little brother, and e) their uncle who’s staying with us as he goes through a divorce. So hopefully they’ll be learning to think within a budget while also learning some generosity and giving-ness.

And meanwhile my partner and I can be on the lookout for gifts for the last of our gift lists. I’m not crazy, of course –I ordered handmade gifts from etsy for as many people as I could manage, but for the hard cases — my brother and sister-in-law, and my dad — I’m pretty well stuck, and running out of time to order anything and have it here for Christmas.

Well, technically, “Chrismukkah” — my family is Jewish, my partner’s is nothing particularly but of Christian stock (outcast Mormon, to be precise), we’ve got Catholics and Christians and observant Jews and non-observant Jews and even atheist Jews (that’s me!). But whatever our faith (or lack thereof) we all have Christmas Day off from work. Since I was a kid, Christmas-time was the only time when everyone in my family could get together, give gifts, have family togetherness funtime.

Stick that in your First Amendment and burn it!

Review coming soon, as soon as the book arrives…

And you’ll keep a scrap of dignity, too. It’s a win-win situation.

By the way, if you have a RedBox near you, I highly recommend it — you pick a video out on the touchscreen, slide your credit or debit card,and a DVD pops out for a buck a night. A great deal if, say, you’re ashamed to show your face at the local Blockbuster and Hollywood Video stores…  Just remember to take it back the next night.  If you have three kids restricted to the house for 9 days, I can guarantee you’ll be making a lot of trips to the store, so that shouldn’t be a problem.

Now the kids are sick, and while we don’t know for sure that it’s mumps, the health district has flown into high gear to avoid an outbreak in the schools. So they’re on isolation (the new way of saying “quarantined”) for 9 days. No school, no Christmas shopping, no playing outside with friends. You can imagine the fun! Especially since none of them feel all that ill; my step-daughter doesn’t feel ill at all, and has no symptoms, but is included as a precaution.

Let me say that again: Three kids, nine days, none of them particularly ill, no leaving the house.

My partner just said we should be keeping a journal: “Day two. The natives are getting restless. We can hear the drums beating in the night…”

Since she’s a trained phlebotomist (that’s someone who draws blood, if you didn’t know) she usually does all the kids’ blood samples herself — it is generally much less traumatic to be stuck by a caring mother than an anonymous doctor or nurse. Plus, she’s really good at it, not always guaranteed with whoever the doctor’s office or clinic has on-duty at any given moment.

So yesterday she had to draw all the kids blood for the Center for Disease Control (CDC). Since this strain of mumps virus isn’t indigenous to the US, CDC wants to track it closely and make sure it doesn’t spread, and I’m assuming add it to the general immunizations. The older kids, no problem. She took my blood last week, no problem. (I’m not sick — except for a nasty cold last week — but they wanted it as a baseline in case I do get sick.)

Then there’s our 5-year old. He was not thrilled at all about the prospect of mom sticking him with an inch-long needle. We tried everything, even at one point holding him down on the floor, but eventually I called “enough”. While the needle-stick itself isn’t likely to be all that traumatic — you really don’t even feel it — I didn’t think we wanted our child to associate us forever with the trauma of being held down and jabbed with needles. Let some stranger carry that burden!

So. Day two. The natives are getting restless. The 12-year old will be fine; he’ll stay in his room playing PlayStation and we probably won’t hear from him until it’s time to complain about going back to school. The others, though — how are we going to keep an 11-year old girl and a 5-year old boy from driving us insane over the next 8 days?

Oh, and since you asked, no, we haven’t worked out the logistics. It doesn’t look likely that worker’s comp will cover their mom staying home; I have a week left of classes that I can’t miss so while I can be home a half-day Monday and Thursday and all day Friday, I can’t take care of the kids on Tuesday and Wednesday. Meanwhile, the health department wants their mom back at work after three weeks — so how do we take care of the kids? We don’t know, but obviously we’ll work out something.

We already have a carpet shampooer/steam cleaner, and wouldn’t spend crazy money on a carpet cleaner anyway, but the whole fabric softener thing is a great idea.  So now we add a capful of fabric softener — whatever you use on your laundry is fine — whenever we shampoo the floors.  It makes the room smell great, instead of smelling slightly musty, which is what the carpet cleaner usually does. And the carpet dries soft, instead of knd of crusty which, again, is how it usually is when we shampoo it.