busy busy blah blah blah

I hate to bitch and moan, especially about the consequences of choices I've made, but allow me to do it for a minute. Here we go: I'm too busy and wah so are we all. It's busy with blessings and wonderful things, but I have been feeling frazzled. A few days ago, though,  I kicked into "high stress, start getting crap done mode" and it's feeling better.

Here's what we've been up to:

1) Thanksgiving. Not our best. I had one sip of white wine and got a migraine, Miss E didn't eat all day because she didn't like the food and had the mother of all melt-downs that nigh. Let me amend that, until about 4, we were ROCKING thanksgiving. 4 kids playing nicely and independently, adults cooking and chatting and watching football (go pack!). Best Thanksgiving ever, until 4. But hey, compared to all the years when the adults didn't even get to sit down and eat together, I'll take it. And Thanksgiving isn't about perfection.

2) Friends visiting.

3) School and school and room parent duties.

4) Getting our tree.

5) Playgroup holiday party - the kids partied until 9 this year!

6) More room parent duties.

Fantasy football. I'm competing for the last spot in the playoffs and could not be more proud of myself. I started this league 2 years ago, not really knowing much about football and am competing with guys who have been avid football fans all their lives. Next Sunday determines if I get in but whether I do or not, I think I've done pretty good. It's fun to have something that you can be super cut-throat competitive with. (full disclosure - I know how geeky this sounds.)

Disneyland planning. We were stressing and stressing about driving to Disneyland over Christmas. It's a 15 hour drive each way, which basically equals 2 full days of driving. The longest the kids have ever been in the car is one day of 7 hours of driving. I had visions of arriving there tired, with the kids having eaten restaurant food for 2 days and it just being a mess. With the kids I feel like we have a limited number of "good" away from home nights. Each year it gets to be more, but right now we are on about 4. That means vacations are fun and awesome and everyone is having a great time until about night 4 when the tiredness and lack of routine and weird food catch up to us, not to mention the fact that neither of my children likes to poop anyplace but home. So driving to Disneyland equals first two good days in car. Plus Peter has to work on Christmas (boo) and we were worried about making it home in time for that. If there was snow on the mountains and we couldn't get through, he wouldn't make it home and that results in another firefighter being ordered to work on Christmas which is UNCOOL. Cannot happen sort of uncool. Ahhh..but the plane tickets so close to Christmas are super expensive which left us with driving. Until I started hearing about these crazy cyber-monday week deals on airfare and found direct flights for a reasonable price. Not crazy cheap, but doable. Still I waffled all day Sunday while Peter was at work I texted him about 30 times - which looked something like this:

me - should we do it?

him - I don't know. yes. Maybe.

me - it's so much money. but i don't want to drive.

him - me neither. Maybe we should do it. can we?

me- clay matthew TD (packers game was on)

him - this game is going to be rough and tumble

me - pros -  minus 4 days of driving and travel wearyness/hotel fatigue, no surprise cost or worry about getting stuck in snow, no wear on car. Cons - money would be tight.

me - it would be a really lean month for us.

him - just returning from a dude who had his head shut in a pickup tailgate. bloodbath.

me - .......nevermind

And there you have it. Plane tickets purchased. Because life is too short not to fully enjoy your only trip to Disneyland and you never know when someone is going to get their head shut in the tailgate of a pickup. (Seriously though, how does that HAPPEN????)