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Saturday, December 25, 2004
anyone says "merry birthday" and they get smacked. In a loving, friendly way, of course.
When I was a little girl, if I was awake at midnight Christmas Eve (and most of the time I was, because, hello, CHRISTMAS EVE), I would watch the clock until it said 12:15 and then hum "Happy Birthday" to myself, because at that time I was precisely another year older. So, as of the time of my sitting down at the computer to write this entry before going to bed (wrapping presents = work. Nobody tell the kids though), I am exactly thirty years old. Funny. I don't feel any older. ;-)
(which was also exactly the same feeling I had on every birthday for my entire childhood. Ten should feel different from nine. What a rip-off.)
So we're all ready for the kids to tumble out of bed at some awful hour in the morning. Up until now on Christmas morning we have always had to drag LT out of his bed at 7:00, still sleeping, and deposit him on the couch to start waking up so that we could open presents. He is not a morning person, let's just say that. Once he's awake he's quite personable, but the transition from sleeping to waking sometimes requires some pretty extreme measures, even on Christmas. This year might be different. We shall see.
By the way, I finished all my last-minute projects on time. LT's robe (and a new Christmas stocking too -- he says he's too old for the one I made him for his second Christmas, with construction equipment on it, so now he has a camouflage one like Daddy's, *snif*) and C's dress/pinafore are wrapped neatly under the tree. Well, the stocking's not wrapped... you know what I mean. The dress only narrowly escaped being wrapped up with the buttons on the pinafore sewn on inside-out. Because I am Suzy Domestic, that's why. I'll try to get good pictures tomorrow, so that when I wonder when I'm fifty why my shoulders are permanently hunched over, I will be able to look at the photos and remember: oh yeah. It dates back to that Christmas when I spent the three days beforehand hunched over my sewing machine like a crone.
Merry Christmas everyone. And I mean that, I hope you are having a day filled with family and joy and memories, and with a very real sense of the reason for this whole celebration (go read Valerie for more eloquence than I feel capable of at this precise sleepy moment on that topic). Thank you all for making me feel like writing in this thing is worthwhile. It's been a lot of fun, and I am so glad that I'm doing it, but if I knew nobody was reading it, I'd have given up long ago. So if you get bored and leave, just don't tell me, and I'll sit here talking to the empty room like I've been known to do in real life from time to time, only this time I'll never know any different. So that's cool.
