Happy New Year...

A Blessed Christmas and a Happy New Year to you!!

Well...as always, things hardly ever go as planned, as least that's how it is in my world.  Here's a little of how our Christmas went...I guess you could consider this my "Christmas letter"...albeit it's only about the past week!  I'm not sure I would be able to remember too much more than that...the days are just packed.

As for my hopes for busting through our yearly flu and coming out shining like the North Star on Christmas morning...hopes banished!  Thankfully no one had the "upper flu".  Miso picked it up from a family member, with fever and cough...then Tank got it, his first real illness...then husband, then yours truly.

By Christmas morning  Miso was still coughing and carrying on, Tank was running a fever and did so for...3...days.  Over 104 at times, he was burning up.  I was prone to very high fevers as a child, so I dreaded giving him "the bath"!  Alas, I sat by him all night just like my mom and grandmother did before me, and kept moving a damp cloth around to soak up the heat.  I believe he had roseola, which Gen also had at about this age...after the fever subsided, a very faint field of red pin-point dots spread across his back and chest.  And then came...the snot....

And us big kids?  The honey had a day of tired, a night of slight fever, and then a few days of headache and congestion.  Yours truly got a head cold simply from being up all night with my subjects!  Lack of sleep always does me in.  I'm completely cured as of today...thanks to kefir sodas.

Here it is January 2nd and the only residual is the Tank and his occasional cough followed by me chasing him around with toilet paper trying to capture the snot monster issuing from his nose before it ends up on something or someone!  Good times...

And decor?!  December 27th...I was putting blue lights on a crunchy, dead Christmas tree...a tree we found leaning against a fence after the tree lot had closed down for the season. We opted to hang our collection of favorite ornaments HIGH UP in a window instead of on the dead tree to keep them from being played with like a tetherball.  We have cherished ornaments from our first Christmas together in 2004, and ever year since...plus very old glass balls that I as a child saw on our Christmas trees.  The only baubles on our tree are newer, but still fun, fabric and wood ornaments...unbreakable!

Due to illnesses, we missed just about every family party...and the saddest part was, I missed Christmas Mass.  It's my "flipped switch" from Advent to Christmas, and it was never tripped.  It really took me a few days to feel like it was Christmas. 

And now here it is time for resolutions already! Or not.  Sure, I have some...some very specific, some grand, some grandiose!  I'll get into that later as, like everything else lately, it's still in the works and not quite ready.  But since one of my "Ideals for 2013" is to be prepared for holidays and such, I better go get busy!  Happy New Year.