There's No Place Like Home for the Holidays. Unless You Are the One Cleaning It.

Aaaaaaaand we're back!

This has been a most tiring week, my friends, and it's only Tuesday morning. We'll see if that bodes well for the rest of the week, but to tell the truth, my schedule is so messed up that I don't even know what day of the week it is, so maybe I won't even notice

We're still enjoying our Christmas vacation, but most of our high-octane festive attitude is starting to wane, and that is a blessing. We need to come down off of our present-opening, cookie-eating high, and face the fact that everyone in this house is one sock away from being stark naked.

Thanks to their extended families (and a mother who was pressed for time and therefore put into panic-buying mode), the children are now living under a thin strata of new toys and games and books. We started our quest to find each new thing a home, but I gave up in favor of concentrating on laundry. It's really that bad.

We had a lovely Christmas Day together, which we managed to not start before seven in the morning. Considering that Francie and Fiver were in our room at 3:45 AM last year, I think this is a huge improvement. I managed five whole hours of sleep.

Our traditional Christmas breakfast of french toast and bacon was a hit, and it filled us up enough to skip lunch. I think the cookies and chocolates also had something to do with skipping lunch, but Christmas comes but once a year, my friends.

Dinner was roast beef with all the trimmings. Including homemade gravy, Mom! Gravy is my Achilles heel in the kitchen, and at Thanksgiving, I always beg my mother to come into the kitchen and make the gravy. I had a reserve jar of gravy as a back-up, but I managed to overcome my weakness and make some really good roast beef gravy. It was Christmas miracle, I tell you!

Of course, as it happens every year, one of the children had to have a "bum gift" year. You know how it goes: the toys are great, but for some reason they don't work properly or break almost immediately.

This year was Fiver's turn, and I'm so glad that it turned out to be the child with the best coping skills and highest threshold for unexpected changes. Ahem. He's actually handling it fairly well, but there are several toys that will need to be returned once I get enough courage to make a foray into the shopping wilderness.

I think I can manage it by St. Valentine's Day.

For my part, I got a new camera from Rob. It has so many settings that the back of it looks like a computer, and it came with a 265 page manual that I plan to read at my earliest convenience. I expect to be taking some awesome pictures in no more than two and a half years. I have already mastered the this-is-for-you-dummy "Auto" setting, so I have high hopes.

I got Rob a recliner, which has now been dubbed the Christmas Chair, and which I have told the children no fewer than eleven hundred times to stop using as a see-saw. My Scottish husband was so proud that I got it for a substantial discount, that he rewarded me by carrying his own gift into the house.

Now I have to get ready for the New Year, which includes the German tradition of cooking a pork roast, the Scottish tradition of First Footing, and the Aimee tradition of not calling my resolutions "resolutions" lest I be tempted to forget them after the first week of January.

I'll be popping in and out, but in case I'm more out than in (a perennial danger with me), all of us here wish you a happy, healthy, and blessed New Year!!

PS: Before I forget (another perennial danger with me), I received some bloggy bling from Laura. I am loving this award, probably more than I should, because I consider Laura's blog to have some darn fine writing. She writes a haiku every Friday, people!

Thank you, Laura, and right back at you, my friend! Since this award didn't specify a number, I'm sending this out to all my faves on my blogroll. I cannot pick just a few because you all make me want to write something fun and fabulous.

I'm still working on that last part. Maybe that can be my non-resolution for 2009?