Not only do you have to work and carry on your normal routine, but you have to be extra jolly or you are a Scrooge.  You have to be extra giving or you are a Scrooge, damn the budget!  You have to be extra helpful and happy, damn the work and family sickness or you’ll be labeled a Scrooge!  No one wants to be a Scrooge, right?  He wasn’t the richest person in town for nothing you know!  He worked!  He made people pay their bills!  And man oh man, do I hate to pay my bills!

I’ve come up with my own Top Ten version of surviving the holidays.  I hope this is helpful and inspiring!

10.  The month before Christmas spend all the extra money you have on eliminating wire-eating squirrel habitats.  This will help your stress load when it comes to spending money on gifts.

9.  After Thanksgiving, have your child get very sick.  There’s always the extra money for the medicine and the retired mother-in-law will be perfectly willing to come to town to stay with him.  This will build good relations with family and give your child time with his grandmother when he is feeling his worst.

8.  After the retired mother-in-law contracts an unknown illness from your child and is miserable,  rely on her for future help.  This will also build good family relations.

7.  After your child is well and back in daycare, have your husband come down with a horrible illness that the doctor says is highly infectious.  The doctor won’t know what it is, just that it’s horribly infectious.  This will help you after your long days at work with the nightly childcare duties as you have to keep father and son apart.  This will help you sleep at night too.

6.  While your husband is home in bed horribly ill, have your child have a recurrence of his previous sickness, only worse.  Since your mother-in-law is now ill and work is not happy that you’ve been taking time off to take care of your husband, you sick son will have to stay with your sick husband who can barely stand.  Have your sick husband take your sick child to the pediatrician as well.  This will leave you guiltily at work and your sick husband will take on all the responsiblity.  It’ll build his holiday character.

5.  Have your pediatrician forbid your child to go to daycare.  You will now have no option to stay home because your office is tired of you taking off, your husband will have to go back to work because it is a new job and he has a ton of work waiting from being out sick.  Your retired mother-in-law has still not recovered from the bug she caught the last time she was here so that will leave you to think of the only person left, your mother.  Perfect!

4.  Have your mother beg favors from her co-workers and take time off from her work so that the guilt mounting is much greater than normal for using/abusing her free babysitting.  This will build that good morale fiber so necessary to becoming something other than Scrooge!

3.  Sometime between Thanksgiving and Christmas and the family getting sick be sure to do all your holiday shopping.  Take lots of time in the two hours you have free each weekend to think what gift would be especially relevant and wonderful for the person you are getting it for.  This will make everyone around you realize that you aren’t Scrooge but a wonderful, creative and talented gift-giver that everyone looks forward to seeing at the holidays.

2.  Exactly one week before Christmas realize that you have had this weird sinus infection for over a month and it isn’t going away.  Contemplate getting sick on your holiday vacation as your body will wind down and everyone else will feel better and want to play. 

1.  One week before Christmas realize that you haven’t properly prepared for the Christmas meal yet.  That will mean more shopping and of course money that wasn’t exactly budgeted for.

*Extra tip:  In the month of December, be sure to read and watch all the daily news as it will inspire and help you to have that wonderful Christmas spirit.  The Scrooge in you will surely be put to rest then.

~Life as Mom

I’d love to hear your holiday Scrooge-fighting tips as well! 

I’ve been following Simple Mom’s 12 weeks to Christmas blog posts on preparing for the big one, the holiday of all holidays, the magic day, the one day kids will be good for! She has some great suggestions and I’ve even tried to follow them as the weeks go by.  I can’t believe we only have Seven Weeks to go.  The only progress I’ve made is that Aden’s gifts are all done!  Yea!  Now for the hard people…the grandparents.  Problem is time is just flying too fast for me.  Foget getting anything done during the week after work.  By the time I get Aden to bed, I’m usually passed out beside him, without so much as a shower.

We are hosting an after-Thanksgiving-turkey-dinner at our house on Saturday as well!  Somehow at this moment, I am calm.  I wasn’t calm last night at 10:00pm when I was doing week old dishes but that’s the good thing about work.  No dishes and an escape from the housework which is how dishes can pile up for a week.  (I didn’t pass out last night with Aden as the Mother-in-law is coming this weekend to visit and all I could envision was her showing up at our doorstep at 9:00am on Saturday and the sink full of week-old dishes.  Would make anyone stay up late.)

So one of Simple Mom’s exercises for this week’s holiday preparation is to write 3-5 words describing the ideal christmas.  Hmmm, in all fairness our christmas usually goes pretty well.  So ideally, clean house, lots of goodies, contented, relaxed and inviting.  It’s the Thanksgiving dinner and the gift shopping that always gets me.  Well….cleaning the house is usually a problem too.

~Life as Mom

I say, fall off the bandwagon!  Leaving spring cleaning to the birds!  In fact, open your house up and the birds will come in and do it for you as they need nesting material right now.

Clearly from the articles, the spring cleaning fling is for SAHMs (Stay at Home Moms).  Who else would have a couple of hours a day just to spend clearing countertops of clutter?  My theory is if you are a stay at home mom and you wait till Spring to clear your countertops than you don’t have much going on the rest of the year.  Shouldn’t your home already be clean?  Of course, I am leaving the WAHMs (Work at Home Moms) out of this because having a job a home and being a stay at home with no job are two different things.

I, on the other hand, am a WM (Working Mom).  I don’t have time for two hours a day regular cleaning much less Spring Cleaning.  I use 5 minute strategies.  If that doesn’t work I complain to my husband until he gets it done.  Needless to say, our bathrooms haven’t been cleaned in a couple of months.

So that being the confession, I just need regular housework done, not bone-grinding baseboard cleaning work.  I have to admit sometimes I get the urge to clean the lighting fixtures of all the bugs that accumulate up there but then I think of the time involved and I think, “what will I have to talk to my son about?”  If there are no bugs in the light fixtures how will we be able to relate to each other?

I’m starting an anti-Spring Cleaning movement.  Don’t Spring Clean.  Spend the time outside, track in mud!  Enjoy the wonderful weather before it gets too hot!  Let the clutter build.  Is your mind really that much more clear?  Will the dust bunnies under the bed really keeping you from acheiving lasting peace?

~Life as Mom

Apparently, Aden has other ideas.  It doesn’t matter how much we feed him or don’t feed him, he always wakes up a couple times of night.  I don’t know if this is typical or not.  Until he starts crawling, I am hoping this horsey keeps his butt exhausted.  I am a tired mommy.

Tired mommies do not do so well at work. I did see a quote recently about how men do not worry about juggling career and home life.  I don’t remember who said it but it is true, although I know Kevin would love to stay home with Aden as much as I would.  I believe we should all work from our homes and save our companies the expense of overhead.  I believe the only reason we go to the office is because we are attached to this antiquated idea of seeing someone in the office which means they are working.  Ha!

With a few mental leaps into the future, we could all be working from home and seeing the people we want to see for lunch.  We could put up whatever artwork we wanted to keep us inspired. We could work in our pajamas. Utopia!  Then mommy could sleep a few minutes longer! At least I wouldn’t have to worry about hiding the bags under my eyes. At least I’m not the only one thinking this way, Chris Pirillo wrote an article for CNN.com about this same thing.

~Life as Mom

At least he is a happy sumo wrestler, at least until he gets hungry or tired.  He is starting to show attachment which I secretly love because I never thought he would know me as his mom.  I always think he sees me as the babysitter and his babysitter as his primary caretaker.  He is always so happy to see her.  God DAMN it.

He can sit up and play by himself with his toys.  He can’t pull himself up yet but he can do an awesome stomach crunch!  He can now roll over from his front to back!  Only because he hates being on his stomach so much.  He is now wanting to touch and mouth everything in sight.  He can recognize his daddy for sure!  He said Ba Ba last week although we don’t know if it means bottle, binky or something else.  I fed him sweet potatoes last night and he ate them like a pro.  The little sumo-wrestler can do some damage to the teether cookies too.

~M

On top of that I am really feeling the postpartum depression especially since coming back to work. I had awful nightmares last night. I woke up hyperventilating, then started crying. I am taking antidepressants and I believe that is helping me to stay in motion. All of our friends have been saying that it takes about six months to get back to normal and that is not even dealing with the body issues. I am really hoping it doesn’t take that long.

I am looking forward to a two-week long break from work to spend with my baby.  I’m hoping that next week the Christmas spirit will come back as I won’t have to worry about work.  Lately work has been so draining as it is so boring.  I am lucky to have a job though.  I know more budget cuts are coming and am hoping my job doesn’t get cut.  Just thinking about that doesn’t help with the depression either.

~M

Once we start taking Aden to daycare I’ll be taking care of him more. The downside is I will get less sleep. I’ll have to get up at 5:00 a.m.! I am NOT a morning person. I do good if I get to work on time. Life is great if I get my hair done in the morning (and that is without a kid). I hope I don’t have to get up earlier than 5:00 a.m. I would have to go to bed at 6:00 p.m. and I don’t even get home from work until then. This working thing just totally sucks.

~M

I have to admit it was a bit easier to leave Aden today as we left him home with his grandmother. She will be watching him this week. Kevin will watch him next week, then his other grandmother will watch him after that. Starting in January, we will be using a daycare center. It was something I was hoping to avoid, but as I have to work we didn’t have much of a choice. Daycare in this town is hard to find. I went to several centers and they were either booked up for years or the center gave me the heebee jeebees and I wouldn’t put my dog in them. (That’s kind of snobby, but that was how I felt.)

It sucks that going back to work coinsides with Aden being more interactive. I know every mom who works goes through this and I really am trying not to be self-pitying. I’m just making my little mommy complaint. Aden’s personality is really coming out. He loves his daddy and just totally lights up when Kevin is near. Even when Kevin is wearing a mask Aden recognizes his voice. Aden loves to do his sit-ups. We can tell he is already going to be very active and need a lot activities to keep him busy. At least in daycare, they will keep him active and busy and he will be tired out when we get home. I hope.

~M