Tuesday, January 05, 2010

Holiday Aftermath

Well, holidays are officially over (well, not if you ask Target because they have already moved on to Valentines Day, St. Patrick's Day and the Superbowl!). The WTF household had pretty nice holiday overall.

For the first time in a long time, I felt as if I actually got to enjoy the holidays a bit more this year. Many times it just all goes by in a red and green blur. Perhaps it is because the kids are older, or we are older but it seems as if we were all a bit more relaxed this holiday. I just didn't feel the pressure to create the perfect Christmas "damn it" and perhaps because there was no pressure, it all seemed to work out beautifully. I even sent out a Christmas card or two. We enjoyed our "old" traditions and perhaps started a new one or two. Maybe when your kids are older, you don't work so hard to create memories because part of the holiday is spent reliving the old ones.

It was nice having Kiki back from college. Mercifully, there were no power struggles over car use and I don't remember any arguments either. She has grown up and so have we. She and I were discussing her New Year's Eve plans which included a group of kids going into the City and spending the night there at a friend's apartment. I was more than a little leery about it and I expressed my concerns about it really being an unsupervised party, likely with alcohol and no adults. Kiki paused for a minute, looked at me and said "Mom, what do you think college is?" . . . . . Alrighty. Actually she is right. We have to get used to her fielding these situations on her own. Now of course, that doesn't mean she still doesn't get the occasional lecture about safety etc and that as an 18 year old, alcohol use is against the law. But I can't be with her every time she has one of this situations pop up. So I have to just take comfort in the fact that I have given her 4,357,286 of these lectures and hopefully when the time is right, she will hear my voice in her ear giving the lecture again as if it were on shuffle on her Ipod.

Snake spent the holiday recharging his battery, which included sleeping until noonish, spending time on the computer, endless hours of football on tv and a few concerts. He went back to school today and I think it has been hard for him to get into the groove. He just called and told me he forgot what the schedule he was on today (his school has a block schedule which has a different schedule each day). So he inadvertantly skipped second period today because he thought it was a day he had a free period. He is on his way to the office to 'fess up and take whatever consequences are assigned.

So now I am left with dismantling Christmas. That always seems to take longer than it did to put it up. I have two mini deadlines, one is to make the house seem livable by tomorrow when Auntie L comes to visit. The next is one is two days later when the recycler comes for the tree. Right now, the cyclone that is my living room says I might not make either deadline. Yikes.

According to Target, I only have 32 more shopping days until the next big holiday, the Superbowl. Fa-la-la-la-la, la-la-la-la!


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