Love and the art of being late

My kids tease me mercilessly for my utter lack of timeliness. I am late for everything. Which is a problem if you're a kid going to basketball practice. Or to chorus. Or, well, anywhere.

When you add that little personality quirk to a major holiday like, oh, say, Christmas, with its very many opportunities to be late, it becomes a nightmare of 2 a.m. cookie baking, crazy Christmas Eve day shopping sprints, and overnight wrapping marathons. It's expensive and exhausting.

And it didn't happen this year.

I don't know if it was the impetus of my latest new au pair heading home mid-month, and taking all my childcare with her, or if it was my sister very nearly begging off Christmas because of the never-ending holiday chaos at my house. But something snapped. And suddenly I was on time.

I finished my shopping a full 10 days before Christmas. And snagged some pretty awesome sales, too.

I had the cookies mixed and baked for my diva's holiday party three days early.

And the wrapping was done on the eve of Christmas Eve. Still an overnight marathon, but it meant I slept - mostly - on Christmas Eve proper. Which made for a much more friendly mom when the kids woke me up before dawn on Christmas Day.

I was still late for a handful of Christmasy things, some of them important. Like Peabo's school holiday party. Though I can legitimately blame that on the onlay that broke the day before (mind you, I was on time to the dentist). Of my three, Peabo is - not surprisingly - the one with the least ability to manage the whole "late mom" thing. He always knows what time it is and is constantly adjusting our clocks. Schedules matter to him. They matter a lot. So does being on time.

But, as I told him between gentle apologies, love means taking someone as they come, faults and all. Even if that someone never really knows what time it is.


Love. Forgiveness. Understanding. Isn't that what Christmas is all about?

Though being on time does help.

Whaddya know? Post number 37! Only 20 more to go before the end of the year ...

Sleeping into the Sunset

It's been 16 days since my last blog post.

You know what I've been doing? Aside from working, raising three kids, managing Christmas and New Year's, and - oh yeah - dealing with a resurgence of head lice (which, fortunately, struck over the holidays when the risk of contagion was low and the time available to nitpick was high).

I just distracted myself. Wait, what was I doing? Oh, right!

I've been sleeping. S-L-E-E-P-I-N-G. Which deserves every capital letter I can find.

I meant to be on vacation, so the sleeping thing would have maybe made sense. Except for, you know, the raging insomnia. But that vacation didn't work out quite as I planned, and I wound up working. I did my work the easy way, though. Started late. Kept it to the daytime. Didn't bring out the computer at night. And you know what happened? I got tired. I got tired, so I got up off my sofa and I went to bed. I made myself horizontal by midnight every single night. Well, except Christmas Eve. But that's only because I was tracking Santa with NORAD and couldn't go to sleep until he was finished.

I'm well rested. Which means I'm not blogging. And I hope it doesn't offend you if I hope for more of the same in 2011. I'd call it a New Year's resolution, but I'm not so good with those.

Since I'm awake now, though, I proudly present my 2010 Done List.

In the past year, I have ...

• Said good-bye to a beloved friend - our dog, Moose, who passed away in January. We still miss her. 
• Survived the 80+ inches of snow dumped on our area last winter. With help.
• Got my kids eating real food, at a real table, with real manners. They put their napkins in their laps and only talk with their mouths full when they have something really important to say.
• Saw my diva into - and then back out of - vegetarianism. Along the way, she learned there's not a veggie grown that she does not love. Even better - she dragged her brothers kicking and screaming into the veggie madness with her. Now I can serve broccoli, cauliflower, green beans, brussels sprouts, peas, corn, cucumbers or carrots ... and everyone eats them. Last week, I introduced sauteed spinach and lima beans - on different nights, of course - and got nothing but yums from the peanut gallery. Hats off to Veggie Girl, because I'm pretty sure none of that would have happened without her.
• Fixed my plumbing. And my car. And my lights. And my computer. And my microwave. I got jiggy with the home repairs.
• Made new friends - a few who actually live near me (yay!), and one who lives with me. I've had lots of great au pairs, but only a few have become true friends - and the one who's living with me now is among the best of them. 
• Hired a boy. That's right - our next au pair is a fella! And he's got the URL to my blog, so if he's reading this - we're pleased as punch that you're coming, and the kids can't wait to make you play soccer with them. Every. Single. Day.
• Got my oldest into the Right School, with the Right People. Which means he's now attending a school where every single person on staff understands Asperger's Syndrome and not only accepts my son but loves him for exactly who he is. So far he's brought home straight A's and a girlfriend and a few best friends who call him just to chat and sometimes to invite him to the movies. His joy at getting on the school bus every day is palpable. (And, a nod here to the local middle school, because they did everything they could to support him and make sure he got where he needed to go.)
• Left my heart in San Francisco. And brought some yummy chocolate home.
• Saw my redhead off to Kindergarten. And only cried a little. And now he's reading. Kindergarten is magic.
• Knit stuff. This year I finished - yes, I said finished - my knitting Olympics project and a handbag, plus the three hats and a scarf I just gave as Christmas gifts. And I finished those last four on time. Barely. But it counts.
• Picked hundreds of nits from the heads of various of my children. And thanked my au pair for doing the same, for them and for me. (Ew.)
  
• Wrote another 57 blog posts. Which seems to be about all I'm good for in any given year, seeing as that's the exact number I wrote in 2009, too. 

Happy New Year, folks. I walked out of 2010 with a smile and my rose-colored glasses decidedly intact. I hope that you can say the same.

Knitting in the Margins

This is the time of year when I start to fantasize about yarn. It's an illness I think. And it's not like I'm a great knitter. I'm not. I'm a knitter who spends most of her time making a living, running three kids to soccer, cooking, cleaning, doing yard work, cleaning up cat vomit and, from time to time, blogging. The knitting fits into the margins. And the stuff you do in the margins is not the stuff you get good at.

But I like yarn. I like the feel of needles sliding back and forth, and the joy of having something to show for it. And I like the fact that knitting keeps me focused during conference calls. I have a lot of conference calls. And I like making things. Time is hands-down my most precious commodity. If I take the time to make you something, well, let's just say I must really, really like you.

There's something about this time of year, too. The kids are back at school. The temps have finally dropped out of the 90s. We can open the windows back up, breathe a little, and know that summer is over.

Which means it's time to think about Christmas.

No, really. It is. For those of us who dream of a handmade Christmas and lots of little gifts of time, it is.

Not that I should be doing anything of the kind. I still haven't finished last year's Christmas gifts. There's a plastic baggie next to my rocking chair, stuffed with a bright blue crocheted scarf and three out of four hot pink crocheted flowers. They are waiting for the fourth flower and a little stitching to finish them off. They didn't quite make it under last year's tree.

On the rocking chair is the nearly finished afghan I started knitting for my parents for Christmas 2008. I tried to give it to them last summer, when my dad turned 70 and their marriage turned 30. They saw it. They oohed. They aahed. They noticed the needles still in it. They gave it back.

And now it's all comfy, cozy and still needled up on my rocking chair.

In the chest of drawers next to my bed, I have a needlepoint canvas in the shape of a stocking, with the distinctive and half-finished half-circle of a piney Christmas wreath laid against a cream-colored background. I designed it myself for my daughter, for her first Christmas. I started it before she was born.

She's 8 now. And this year marks her ninth Christmas.

Oops.

That stocking is sitting on top of a stack of orange and magenta cotton I bought to knit her a sweater. It's a little tiny stack of yarn. But then, it was supposed to be a little tiny sweater. She was going to wear it home from the hospital when she was born.

She didn't, of course. It's kinda hard to wear unknit cotton yarn. 

But I dream. I dream of knitting. I dream because it's Christmas. Or close to it. Well, closer.

I want to make one of these. Because I think my five-year-old frog squisher deserves one. And for my daughter, this one. Because she misses our dog.

I hope the kids still like them when they're 20. Because that's about when these will be finished.