Diana Rowland — Writing, Life, and the Stuff in between

My house is… quiet. It’s a wonderful noise.

My husband, who is an incredibly wise man, and who also knows when to act in self-preservation as well as the preservation of the Spawn That Came From My Loins, has taken said Spawn to the movies.

She’s really a very good Spawn, but I’ve been working like crazy today as I begin the oh-so-enjoyable task called Packing The House. And Spawn likes to help. In her own inimitable fashion. She:

throws her toys into the box of books that I’m packing
begs pleads whines cries to be allowed to help pack the very breakable knicknacks
nags me to make a box for her
throws anything that’s not nailed down into the box
tries to pack the cat
cries when the cat scratches her
asks me if we’re taking the couch to the new house
asks me if we’re taking the tv to the new house
asks me if we’re taking the pillows to the new house
asks me if we’re taking the [insert every single possible item in the house] to the new house
throws a fit when she sees the bag of her (outgrown) clothes that is headed for Goodwill: “Those are MINE!!”

and on and on…

We don’t close on the sale of the house we’re selling until January 28th, but it looks like we might be closing on the house we’re buying in about a week. (Short sale!) This required a bit of minor jiggery with financing, however it’s also a huge relief to me since I was dreading the thought of trying to move this entire frickin’ house in essentially one day. Now, with several weeks to make the move, I can delude myself into thinking that we’ll be able to get things organized from the get-go, as well as get rid of all of our extraneous stuff.

Do NOT challenge this delusion.

Yeah, I’m pretty much having the worst Holidailies ever. I’ve missed three days this month. Jeeez!

Well, six years ago today I was on my first date with the man who is now my husband. In celebration of that momentous occasion I took the day off from work, and Jack and I went into New Orleans for a lovely lunch at The Rib Room in the French Quarter. After that we came back to the northshore and basically hung out the rest of the day until it was time to go pick up The Kid. Doesn’t sound too exciting, I guess, but it was really nice to just spend time together like that.

The funny thing is that this is the anniversary that we make a big point of celebrating every year. We rarely, if ever, celebrate our wedding anniversary–usually because we both forget about it. But December 28th gets special attention every year. Personally, I think that makes far more sense, since the wedding itself was not the start of our life together. Our first date was Dec 28th, 2001, we moved in together just a couple of months later, and then got married in our living room in July. When you know it’s right there just doesn’t seem to be any point in waiting around.

If someone had come up to me on December 27th, 2001 and told me that in just a few years I would be married with a kid I would have laughed in their face. So far I’m pretty pleased with how things have turned out.

Yesterday was spent with me running like crazy from wakeup to go-to-sleep. My side of the family had dinner and presents at my house, which meant that the morning was spent in a frenzy of cleaning and cooking. Then a couple of hours for eating and present-opening, then rushing to church to squeeze into the kid-friendly service–the one service of the year where I don’t feel guilty about the noise my kid makes because there are three thousand other kids making noise. (Actually she’s quite good in church, and I’m probably hyper-sensitive to every little sound she makes.) By the time church was over and we made it back home, I barely had the energy to forage leftovers for myself and the kid, and so I gave myself a christmas present and allowed myself to miss a day of blogging yesterday.

Trust me, it wouldn’t have been very exciting anyway. Probably something like, “Yeeearrghhbluuurblebuddabababammmftth!”

And to be honest, today’s is probably not going to end up being much more exciting than that, though this morning was delightful as we watched Anna revel in Christmas Morning present-filled goodness.

The afternoon was spent with my husband’s side of the family which was enjoyable, but just as exhausting as five step-kids, five step-grandkids, as well as various other family units can be. Yeah, I’m whupped. I’m almost relieved to be going back to work.

Okay, that last was a lie.

wrappingwrappingwrappingshoppingshoppingshoppingwrappingwrappingshoppingwantingtothrottlestupidpeoplecookingcleaningwrappingcollapsing

I raced to Target after work and managed to get about 95% of the various shopping for kids out of the way. With five grandkids between six months and six years, plus the Kid of my own, by the time I made it to the checkout line my cart was crammed to bursting with toys, games, stuffed animals, puzzles… Gah! I then felt obliged to explain to the checker that I was shopping for six kids. I didn’t want her to think I was going this overboard for just one or two kids. I may have to pick up one more toy each for the two oldest grands, but at this point I at least feel like I’ve made significant progress. Whew!

The trick then was figuring a way to pile all of the bags of toys in the back of my little Honda Fit so that Anna wouldn’t see them–since my next stop was to pick her up from daycare. Thankfully one consistent thing about my vehicle is that it’s always full of junk, so with strategic positioning of the usual crap and a leather coat, I successfully shielded the tell-tale red and white bags from her prying little eyes. But then it was back to Target to get a tree. Yes, it is less than a week until Christmas, and we have yet to get a tree. And at this late hour there’s no way I’m going to shell out the bucks for a real tree, so we got a quite modest little artificial thing and a couple of containers of cheap ball ornaments.

Anna did the majority of the decorating herself, and even managed to understand the concept of even distribution of ornaments. Of course then she wanted to “make it pretty” by putting lots of present underneath it, and promptly pulled some of her socks out of the clean laundry pile and wrapped them up. However, the coolest thing was that she wanted to sing Christmas carols while we were decorating the tree. It was charming and sweet and something I will remember for the rest of my life.

I’m tired and my stomach is not feeling awesome about my dinner, and so you will have to be satisfied with this picture of Anna’s gingerbread cookies. She decorated them all by herself.

Dear Santa,

I changed my mind. To hell with all of that Christmas cheer crap that I asked for in the last letter. I don’t really care if people hate Christmas or not. All I want is for this frickin’ house stuff to be over. Get me my financing. Get me a nice house in a nice neighborhood. I’m really sick of this entire process. It’s been six months now. I’m over it.

Best wishes,

Diana

Today I’ve been:

-waiting to hear back on the offer we made on the house.
-waiting to hear back from the lender.
-waiting to hear from some lucky editor who has finally realized what a gem my novel is.
-waiting for the holidays.
-wading through laundry.
-wading through rewrites and edits.
-waging the never-ending battle against clutter
-waylaying my husband and making him put Anna to bed
-waning in my ability to write interesting posts
-waiving, yet again, my self-imposed challenge to write interesting and/or meaningful entries
-wasting too much time on teh intarnets

“Weekends like these, I feel like the time has been stolen from us.”

That was my husband’s comment when we finally got home tonight. It wasn’t wasted time, by any stretch, but it was one of those insanely packed-full-busy-as-hell weekends where we had every minute planned from the time we woke up until well after dark in the evening. There sure as heck wasn’t a second of relaxing, and even though it was productive and worthwhile, there’s still that part of us that really aches for time to just… chill.

Yesterday was spent looking at houses. All. Day. Long. As soon as we were cleaned up and fed after waking we headed off to do drive-bys on the list of houses that our new real estate agent emailed to me on Friday. After an hour of this we went off to meet my sister who had VERY kindly agreed to watch Anna for the day, which was very much appreciated since looking at houses with a three-year-old in tow would have been nightmarish. Anna was duly delivered, and then we went back to doing drive-bys until the time to meet our agent.

Despite the fact that we were able to eliminate a good number of houses just from exterior inspection, it still took most of the day to see the ones we wanted to see. However! We found two houses that are very appealing (in extremely different ways, oddly enough.) We certainly had our wish list or everything we wanted in a house and neighborhood, and we had to compromise on a certain number of things, but at the end of the day we went ahead and made an offer on one of the houses. To be honest, I don’t hold out high hopes of actually getting that house for what we can afford, but if we don’t get it, we’ll be more than happy to go for the other house, which we definitely can get in our price range.

Finally, at the end of the day I made it over to my sister’s house to pick up my darling child. Little did I know that my sister had done her best to corrupt her pure innocent heart during the day. You see, my niece takes belly-dancing lessons, and had brought home a belly-dancing video. During the watching of this, my darling, pure, unsullied daughter got up and started copying the moves on the video. Extremely well, I might add. (I wish, how I WISH that I’d had a video camera, because it was utterly priceless!!!) Then, Anna asked me if I “had a babysitter.” I told her no, at which time she poked my tummy and said, “You have a babysitter in your belly!” (Hey, I was slouching, and.. and there might have been a slight roll of fat.)

Anyway, after my sister stopped laughing hysterically I managed to collect my child and return to my own abode.

Then today was no less busy, though in a different way. Jack had to go into the office for a couple of hours, and when he returned we went out to grab breakfast, then headed across the lake to go to the zoo for the birthday party of one of the grandkids. This was supposed to be from 1 to 3. I also had the party for my writers group at 2, so at about 2:30 we excused ourselves from party #1, raced down to Whole Foods to grab something suitable to bring to Party #2 (since I didn’t think anyone would want food that had been sitting in a warm car for a few hours,) and made our way to Gentilly. We lasted there less than two hours… or rather, Anna lasted less than two hours, at which time we made our excuses and headed back to the northshore.

We’re now at home, it’s fast approaching the time to put the kid to bed, Anna’s running a low-grade fever, and we’re all exhausted.

Happy Weekend!

Dear Santa–

I have a small list this year:

1) I want you to stop people from proudly spouting, “I hate Christmas!” as if joining some cool secret society. Make them stop saying, “Bah Humbug,” with a proud and superior smirk. Make them stop and think about why they hate Christmas, and then maybe make them try to do something about that. And, maybe, just maybe, make them look at the people who still love Christmas and the kids who still believe with every fiber of their being that Santa Claus is real, and maybe suggest that if they help add to that joy, that belief in the wonder of Santa and Reindeer and love and giving, that maybe Christmas won’t be quite as hateable.

2) I want a bicker-free Christmas. No bickering about who goes to whose house when. No whining about who should call who first. No bitching about the fact that no one ever comes to visit. I just want a nice friendly Christmas where I can watch my daughter and my step-grands open their presents without the grownups–young and old–finding some reason to be dissatisfied.

3) I want people to remember that joy begets joy and misery begets misery. Please remind them that if you are pleasant to be around, then more people will want to be around you.

Santa, I know that there’s not much chance of me getting everything on my list, but any little bit you can do will be greatly appreciated.

Thanks,

Diana