By Nicole

"It's the most wonderful time of the yearrrrrr..."  Has anyone seen that commercial for The Bachelor?  Normally, I wouldn't have, but we were visiting Jason's grandparents after Christmas and I saw it on TV.  I immediately started laughing.  A snarky type of laughter.  Not about those poor, beautiful girls crying over a situation that they, themselves , went through a rigorous auditioning process to be placed in.  No, instead, I was snickering about how the twisted humor to be found in sobbing hysterically at the most wonderful time of the year applies to this poor woman.  Aqui, estoy. Flashback, Christmas Eve. Okay... just before Christmas Eve... This year, I felt like I was pretty much on top of the whole holiday thing.  I wanted my family to be focused more on how important the birth of Christ is and not on how important the presents were.  I had persevered through the entire Christmas card stamp...

"Mah-wage.... Mah-wage is what bwings us togevah today.  Wuv, twue wuv... that bwessed awangement, that dweam wiff-in a dweam."  You gotta love the priest from the Princess Bride.  (Hey, you've gotta love the Princess Bride!) A month or so back, I posted a teaser post .  I knew I wanted to write about the past couple of weeks that I had been going through, but it all just kept piling higher and I couldn't formulate the words.  I'm not sure that I have entirely found the words even at this point, but I wanted to remember that I needed to get this out.  And at this point it has been long enough that I can joke about it.  I haven't made it to the Scripture references yet, so bear with me there. During that time, I Googled "eight years of marriage" and "the seven year itch" and came up with a bunch of hits on wedding anniversary presents and divorce rates, which I guess only makes sense because you are either having an a...

Whew, it has been a whirlwind couple of days.  And I have no expectation that things will slow down. One of the most annoying things for me this month of NaBloPoMo is that my blog has felt more like Facebook status updates than any real writing.  Not only have I not had time for it, I just haven't had a writer's mind lately.  My mind is filled with nothing but to do lists and checkmarks.  In fact, I am so sidetracked these days that I spent most of yesterday reversing my words. Whatever I meant to say, I said backwards.  Instead of wash your face and brush your teeth, it was brush your face and wash your teeth. Most of date night was spent with me reversing everything or taking long pauses between sentences so I could make sure that my mouth actually said what my mind was thinking and that whatever my mind was thinking made sense. I married a patient man, thank goodness.  Thankfully, today was a laid back, do a lot of random things type of ...

Tonight we took our girls caroling at the long term care facility.  My Missionettes girls are in 4th grade, and at the spur of the moment, we joined the middle school and high school girls to drive across town (a whole two minute drive) and do two laps around the really tiny wing of the hospital.   Please don't imagine well dressed girls with caps and coordinating song books.  We were a rag tag bunch singing the choruses from memory.  Please don't imagine beautiful rounds and well practiced carols. We sang off key renditions of Jingle Bells, Santa Claus is Coming to Town, Silent Night and We Wish You a Merry Christmas.  We busted up on our attempt at Away in a Manger and moved on.  This has been a pretty standard activity for my group of girls for the last, wow, eight years.  Usually I am just a tag-a-long.  Rarely am I the one that organizes any of it.  Some years we practice.  Most years we don't.  S...

Saturday night, after about 3 hours of online shopping and listmaking and checking off and checking out, Jason and I called it a night.  Before the shopping marathon, we also decorated the tree with the kids and set out the rest of the Christmas stuff.  Our house has lights and a tree and Christmas decorations. We drank coffee and hot chocolate from Christmas coffee cups!  As I write this, I feel like I should be filled with joy and cinnamon and a happy "light"ness that comes with the Christmas season. There should be peace and a bubbling anticipation of Christmas Day and time with family and celebrating the birth of Christ. Yet, instead, I have knots in my stomach and a little bit of dread mixed with guilt churning into anxiety.  Saturday night, I stayed awake in bed for what felt like hours with my heart pounding and my mind swirling... all the things I need to get done and haven't.  The traditions we have started and expectations we have set and...

Ever since I can remember, I have loved to read.  My mom started teaching me when I was about 3 or 4, and I just took off.  I remember as a kid spending a rainy Saturday curled up in a chair reading from a whole stack of Babysitter's Club books.  It was not unusual that I would read two or three in a sitting.  I was kind of a freak.  We had this huge, ridiculous bookshelf at home that my dad had built.  He basically took two logs, stood them up, cut board sized grooves, and slid unfinished lumber in for each shelf.  They were huge and heavy and filled with books.  A set of encyclopedias, all the how-to books, a set of the "classics" (you know, the ones with the dark colored binding and gold letters) and all you could read Nancy Drew and Grace Livingston Hill books.  There were more, but those I remember right now.  Next door, at my uncle's house, it was the same way.  Loads of books.  Louis L'Amore, Tom Clancy, Joh Grisham, Da...

Where to start. Over the course of the past four months I have done two entirely unrelated things (I have also done LOTS more unrelated stuff - like deep clean my refrigerator, clean, grind, cut and wrap 70 lbs of deer meat (with Jason ), sew a merman tail and learn to make cedar roses - but those are not part of this particular story). So the two things... begin my Christmas shopping super early (in order to avoid stress, relax and enjoy the Reason for the Season) AND slowly let frustrations regarding events mostly beyond my control pile up and stress me out until I sometimes want to scream and run down the street pulling my hair and basically making a complete fool of myself. Soooo, all stress that would have been relieved by Christmas shopping early, has now multiplied much beyond what it ever would have been EVEN if I had waited until Christmas Eve and marathon shopped. Every night and every weekend I have told myself - now is the time to relax, let it go, in the grand scheme of ...