Pike's Peak Monday

Bless me Father, for I have sinned. It's been (gulp) two weeks since my last blog post.

Well, if I'm really confessing, it's even worse. It's been two weeks since I did a lick of writing. (Double gulp)

I could say it was the holiday madness, the baking, the cooking, the wrapping, the sending. And it was, partly, but it was more a choice this year. Forty is just over the February hill. So, throwing my OCD caution to the wind, I decided to try and chill out a little with my family this holiday season. You know, live life on the edge. Enjoy the holidays.

It was a good first effort, I think, but it was still crazy. My youngest's seventh birthday was Monday, December 22. Which meant, while my husband was in Germany visiting his parents, I singel-handedly organized a roller skating/sleepover birthday party on Friday, December 19. Then had a signing on December 20. Thank God for concealer. I wasn't looking scary, I don't think. I still sold a few books, but people did stare at me kinda oddly.

Didn't get a chance to sleep after that either. I rolled right into frantic, last minute baking for Christmas. There was the actual second child's birthday day celebration on Monday, more cooking on Tuesday and Wednesday, Christmas Thursday (and I'm one of those adults who cannot sleep Christmas Eve. I know there's no such thing as Santa, sort of).

Complete and utter exhaustion came on Friday. Did I mention that's my mom's birthday?

We tried to get to her house, honest, but my oldest interrupted our "spontaneous" dinner outing with a violent GI bug that brought took us straight home, no detours, no birthday cake, no presents, just a cool wash cloth and another sleepless night. Saturday, I had a signing. More concealer. More hidden yawns.

Sunday was the biggest day of all, really. It was my grandparents 65th wedding anniversary. Everyone flew in, all five of my dad's siblings with families. There's the family to the right. Not bad. They're a rowdy bunch. You've gotta love them. Take a look at my grandpa there on the far left. I wanna look that good at 87.

The party was a shingdig to end all shindigs, and spilled into the better half of the beginning of the next week, right up to New Year's Eve. Which sailed by with friends, then more sleepovers for the kids, friends over, cooking, and then, finally, Friday night - blessed reprieve. My parents took the girls for a sleepover.

I went out for dinner . I got to sleep in. No signings, no gymnastics meets, no cooking, no parties, no holidays, no packing, no unpacking, no putting away. Just relaxation. It felt like the universe aligned for one brief but glorious day.

And then Sunday came with all the chore of putting away the holiday. Ugh.

Now it's Monday, and I'm back at my desk. The mountain on it is so tall, I swear there's what definitely what looks like snow accumulating on its higher peaks above my head. Are we due for an early Spring this year, I hope?

But as I tackle the slope before me, I have to say, it was worth it. Amidst all of the craziness, I got time to cuddle with my kids, play with them, go to the movies with them, talk to them. I had time to reconnect, sleep in.



And I feel...what is the word...I haven't said it in so long...
Relaxed.
Yeah, that's it. Relaxed.

So maybe climbing to the summit of neglected work won't be so bad. Maybe. I've got an oxygen mask this time, all of those memories.

And please check out these amazing reviews of Dragon Wishes:

J Aday and I talk all about Book Signings and Dragon Wishes

Brandy McDonnell the Oklahoma Daily did a great review too! Thanks Brandy.

Christmas Tree Chaos

I promised a story on Wednesday about Christmas trees. Here it is in all it's dysfunctionality and puzzlement. Reader beware. It's really is the Chevy Chase, Christmas Vacation, craziness in your tree kind of story.

It all has to do with perception of course. Perception of straightness. I wasn't infected with this until I met my husband's family. They're German. Live in Germany, cleanliness is next to godliness, compulsive-obssessive things must be exactly correct, German. And I mean that in a nice way. I just didn't really understand it until my first Christmas with the family.

That very first Christmas I spent with them, I had just moved to Germany and begun a Master's program at the University in Kiel. I was homesick and far away from home, almost at the north pole, I was so far north.

My then boyfriend - now husband - asked me to come home with him to meet his family for that quiet, gentle, highly functional event - a holiday. And not just any holiday. The mother of all holidays - Christmas. I was foolishly in love and said "yes" right away. This was a sign of commitment, right?

There were many many many embarrassing moments that trip, mostly on my part, with my lack of understanding of nuance in the German language, a very small apartment, and cultural craziness.

But the highlight of the whole weekend was when my husband and his mother put up the Christmas tree on Christmas Eve, as is traditional in Germany. His father didn't help. This is important. I didn't either. We each had our reasons. His I've never figured out. Mine, well, it had to do with safety. They put real candles on trees over there. And light them. I was already way out of my league. What if I put a candle on wrong and when it was lit, it burned down the whole apartment. I didn't think that would be good for "deepening" the relationship. So I watched.

No words were necessary for the subtle family dynamic that ensued after the tree was up. My husband and his mother put it up. They carefully decorated it. They put on the glass ornaments, the silver icicles, the candles, the tree skirt, and then stood back to admire their handiwork. I have to admit, it looked good.

Then my soon to be father-in-law walked in. Grimaced and said, "Es ist total schief." Which means, "It's totally crooked." And then walked out.

I was puzzled. Didn't he want to fix it?

Ah, not exactly.

My husband and his mother walked in, looked at the tree, cocked their heads left, then right, then left again. "Do you see it?" my mother-in-law asked. My husband shook his head.

Still, they pushed the tree in one direction. (It had looked straight to me before, and it still looked straight now. So maybe I wasn't the right one to ask. They didn't, by the way. This was a "family" thing.)

Twenty minutes later, my father-in-law walked in, took one look at the tree and said in a more exasperated voice, "It's totally crooked!"

I still didn't see it, but my husband and his mother came back in, tried to straighten out whatever "schiefness" there was to the tree, and then left again.

I was absolutely sure they'd gotten it right.

Not so.

This ritual went on the rest of the day, all the way up to church and after and into the next day. I'm not sure the tree ever got straight enough for my father-in-law. And he didn't ever try and fix it.

I don't pretend to understand what happened exactly. I've never seen this ritual in any other German household, but who knows. I chalked it up to family dynamics. However, it's begun to invade our house now, in a new way. Our trees are always crooked. So crooked that one fell down last year, spilling that delicious tree water all over the floor and breaking a few ornaments.

So....maybe it's good to be obssessive about straight trees, but we can't seem to master it. I spent five hours "watching" our nine foot tree on Tuesday because it had begun to lean all on its own. Don't ask me why. My husband came home, puzzled. How had that happened? To avoid last year's disaster we made it lean toward the front windows. This way, if it falls, it'll hit the window. Okay, there's the chance the window might break, but if it doesn't we've save the ornaments. Pretty smart, right?

Just don't tell my father-in-law.