Today is the last day of NaBloPoMo, where many bloggers posted daily throughout November. It’s been a lot of fun even though there have been occasions where I’ve been stricken with “augh, what do I write?” panic, wherein I beg George to give me an idea of something to write about (hint: he is not helpful at all). However, mostly I did okay without having to stretch too hard.

And so naturally, I went and signed up for Holidailies which covers posting throughout the month of December. I may just run out of steam with that one but I’ve done it every year, so I have to at least try. Also, because of the holidays you are allowed to miss a few days here and there if you need to.

Still, if I suddenly implode from a lack of things to write about, I may just join Jessica with her idea of 31 Days of Nothing instead.

Breanna’s birthday may have been last week but her birthday party is going to be this Saturday, so in between the eight thousand other things, I’ve been slowly preparing for it. Tonight I completed phase one by getting some of the things I absolutely need for tomorrow. That meant going to the grocery store for the ingredients for the two big lasagnas I’ll be making (ground beef, sauce, tomato paste, cottage cheese, a big old block of cheese for grating, sliced olives (yes, olives), and vegetables) and the stuff I need for the cake.

I’m thinking of doing a Caillou cake since Breanna loves that whiney little twit Caillou very much. It’s not like it would be hard – bake the two round layers, stack them, tint the white icing with a few drops of red to make it Caillou’s peach-pink skin tone, and then use some of the tube icing I bought to draw the outline and the facial features. I mean, he’s not exactly a complex character to draw, it’s not like trying to freehand draw Dora or Uniqua with icing. We’ll see. My back up is always the ladybug or butterfly cake, but Caillou would be something different.

I really wanted to make this castle cake and it doesn’t even look overly complicated but I’m already stressed out about other things so I don’t think I should try anything that has even a remote possibility of raising my blood pressure in any way.

Tomorrow, in between work stuff, housework, taking care of two kids, and trying to eat/pee/breathe, I’ll make the sauce for the lasagna, assemble it, bake it, and stick it in the fridge to be reheated on Saturday. Then I’ll try to get the cake done in the afternoon so I can ice it and decorate it in the evening after the kids go to bed. I always like to try to get the cake fully done the night before because I always figure that if I screw it up in some way I can have a little hissy fit, throw it across the room and into the garbage (or possibly off the balcony) and then ask George to get me new supplies and I’ll still have Saturday morning to do it. It’s always good to have a plan.

I don’t know why I get so stressed about these parties, they’re always fun and everyone enjoys themselves, and I’ve never once had any kind of disaster involving food poisoning, running out of food so that everyone is starving and has to order pizza, or stoves catching on fire. Also, not one guest has ever shown up with white gloves, ready to run a finger along all my furniture to check how well I dusted. And my floor is always sparkling clean until the first three or four guests arrive and then you’d never know I had even washed it once in the seven years we’ve been here. So I have no reason to get frazzled but I do. I freak out and rush around and worry and then people arrive, I have my first glass of red wine, and everything is fine.

Now to make my to-do list with all 1575 things I need to accomplish by 4 pm Saturday…

I can’t tell you how badly I need a Sock Zombie. That is ridiculously cute.

Hayley has paid for things before today. If she comes to the store with me, I usually give her the money to give to the cashier. If we order some food on occasion, I’ll let her pay the delivery guy and then show her how much to give for a tip. She’s also spent her own money before. She had gotten some money for her birthday and she used it to buy the Go Diego Go Animal Rescue Center (or whatever the heck it’s called).

However, she’s always had us there with her. Today, though, she had a Scholastic book fair at school and we sent $15 with her to pick out her own stuff which was a difference from sitting down with me at the table with a flyer to choose some to order.

I spoke briefly to the teacher after school (Breanna is crazy about her so at least once a week I have to take her to see the teacher or Breanna gets testy) and apparently there was a book with Hayley’s name in the title that she wanted but she was two bucks short, but she didn’t seem too disappointed and she was eager to show me what she got.

I was a little worried because I had read Heather’s entry about how there was an awful lot of non-book toys of a crappy nature, and I wondered if she’d picked some of those. I had decided to show her I was proud of how she had made her own choices and paid herself, but I was seriously hoping she hadn’t gotten some sort of junk.

I was pleased to find out she had picked out two My Little Pony books for five bucks each and she spent the remaining five on a little set that contained a few fancy pencils, some erasers, and a sticky note pad. I was really okay with the last purchase because although it wasn’t books, it wasn’t garbage either and it’s something she can use when we do her homework over this long weekend.

Having my daughter come home with things she bought all on her own (obviously with a bit of help, mind you) made me realize once again how big she’s getting.

It’s a long weekend because it’s the end of term; they got their report cards and Hayley did really well. They mentioned a few things she can work on together at home but pretty much everything was great in all sections (physical development, social, communication, understanding, etc.).

How is my first born baby big enough for book fairs and report cards?!

There will be another entry up later today (or this evening), but in the meantime, I was lucky enough to receive a complimentary Spark Talking Telescope from the Discovery Store and I have posted a review of it up in my review blog.

After I got Hayley off to school, I set about doing a few necessities, such as tidying up and getting a bit of work out of the way because I knew that once my friend dropped her baby off, I wasn’t going to be doing anything other than taking care of him and of Breanna.

I was really looking forward to hanging out with a wee baby again but the one thing I was worried about was that Breanna would be jealous. She loved him well enough the other times she saw him but I wondered if she would start freaking out when she saw me holding a baby in her home instead of holding her. She’s two, after all, and very tempermental (you should see the hilarious picture I have of her from this evening when she had a little tantrum – how DARE I say she can’t have another cookie?! – and then threw herself down on the floor in a very dramatic “woe is me” pose), so I was almost expecting the worst after she realized it was just the three of us.

Much to my surprise, she was not only fine, she had a great time. In fact, I was right that she was jealous but not because I wasn’t holding her. She was jealous because she wanted to hold the baby herself. She kept putting her arms out to him and imploring, “I hold! I hold him! Me! My turn!” I got her to sit beside me on the couch and I helped her hold him (I still mostly had him but he was halfway on her lap too) and she postively beamed as she sat there, so pleased with herself for holding a baby.

She hugged him and kissed his forehead, she helped me rub his back when he needed to burp and she patted his arm when he was crying because I was preparing his bottle. At one point I put him in his car seat while he dozed so I could get her some paper to draw on and she sat beside us on the floor and tried to give him her Elmo to hold (“Baby! Here Elmo!”).

It was overwhelmingly cute. I’m sure if he was a permanent fixture she would quickly get over being enthralled but she sure did love him today. Her birthday party is on this coming Saturday and I know she’s going to be so excited when she sees him again in just a few more days.

(NO, she is NOT getting a baby brother OR sister, so hush!)

Tomorrow I am expecting to be completely useless. Aside from the fact that I never go to bed early enough and I have to get up at 6:30 to get Hayley ready for bed, I’m usually tired so mornings are a challenge anyway as far as feeling productive. Lately I’ve been doing a pretty good job of getting a lot done before Breanna’s nap time but not always.

But tomorrow I will be even more useless than ever as I relive the days of two years and five years ago. Friends of ours just had their second baby and due to a doctor’s appointment, she asked me if I could babysit for just a couple of hours.

How much actual productive work do you think will be going on tomorrow morning when I have one very cute toddler and one very cute baby in my midst? (Hayley is downright peeved that she has to go to school when a baby is coming over. She really wanted to stay home.)

Yeah right, there will be plenty of lullabies and rocking and snuggling and oohing and ahhing, but very little productive stuff beyond that.

God I miss being unproductive for a very good reason!

Once upon a time I had gotten into a really good habit of planning a menu for the week. It was loose in the sense that I am not rigid enough to insist we have Tuesday’s meal if we all really feel like having Wednesday’s that day instead. I also don’t plan lunches (though it’s nice when the supper from the night before is big enough to have leftovers the next day) or breakfasts. Sides are usually some form of vegetables cooked on the stove or just a salad.

However, I got away from it for awhile and it gets frustrating because that’s when we end up resorting to some kind of crap that we order in that isn’t good for us or else we have to do multiple grocery runs to get something to eat. I expect to need multiple purchases of bread and milk, but not meal supplies.

This weekend I managed to get a list of groceries together that will actually allow for a week of meals for the first time in awhile. For the curious, here’s what we’re having this week.

Sunday: Spaghetti with meat sauce (I love this because my sauce makes enough for supper, lunch, and either another supper or a container of it in the freezer for some panic-filled day in the future)
Monday: Roast chicken, inexplicably called Sticky Chicken.
Tuesday: Sloppy Joes
Wednesday: Chicken Tikka Masala (I can’t wait to try this)
Thursday: Either pancakes and beans or leftover spaghetti, whichever people prefer.
Friday: Aztec Beans
Saturday: Breanna’s birthday party which means my lasagna!

It’s nice to know I don’t have to think too hard for supper this week. What are you having?

Or maybe remind me to keep even my mind shut, because I didn’t even say it out loud. Last night, for whatever reason, I was thinking about how Breanna didn’t pull the Midnight Madness as often as Hayley did.

Midnight Madness was what we called it when she would wake up right around the time we were thinking about going to sleep, and she would stay up for hours. It was also how we referred to middle of the night wake-up sessions, where she would suddenly perk up at, say, 3 am and decide there was nothing she wanted to do more than say wide awake for at least three hours.

Breanna has done it on occasion, but not anywhere near as frequently as Hayley. Hayley always treated sleep as something that was possibly the worst waste of time she could possibly imagine and she would do everything in her power to avoid it. Breanna enjoys sleep, she even asks to go “night-night” when she’s tired. Putting her down for a nap is usually very easy and fast – she has a predictable routine where she’ll suddenly start making unreasonable demands, she’ll get extremely pissed off when we don’t do what she wants, then she’ll throw herself in my arms and if I ask if she wants to go to sleep she wails, “night-night!” Then she falls asleep within ten minutes tops. It’s nice. Bedtime usually takes a bit longer but isn’t bad either.

So there I was last night, thinking, “I’m so happy that Breanna doesn’t do the Midnight Madness like Hayley did.” Then I realized that I was completely dragged-down exhausted, so I just about crawled around, getting myself ready for bed, when I heard the door open down the hall and little feet pattering along the floor. Looking confused and ticked off about being upright, Breanna barrelled into the living room and I carried her back to bed. I willed myself to not fall asleep since I still have to pee and waking up for a bathroom break a few hours later was not in my plans. I managed to hand in there until she was asleep, and ten minutes later my weary body crashed onto the mattress so I could sleep too.

And naturally, at 3:21 am, she woke up. I don’t know what time she went back to sleep because I stopped looking at the clock eventually, but I know it was after 4:30. Eventually, I told her to go ahead and stay up all night if she wanted but to be quiet and leave me alone since I wanted to go to sleep now. I figured, in my mind, that at least she was likely to sleep in a bit.

Which is why she woke me up at 7:15 am and raring to face the day.

Some days, there’s just not enough caffeine.

I just looked at the date and realized we’re one month and one day away from Christmas now. Normally I wouldn’t worry too much because George and I are both procrastinators (there’s a reason we never got married – too much planning ahead!) and we tend to not shop before the 20th of December anyway.

However, I’m feeling just a bit of panic now. For one thing, I want to get Hayley something fun but she’s not really into any one type of toy – the good thing is this means we aren’t buried under eight million Polly Pockets or Barbie dolls (or worse, Bratz dolls), but the bad thing is that it makes it hard to think of some sort of toy to get her as a gift.

As for Breanna, it was hard enough thinking of what to get for her birthday, now I have to come up with a few things for Christmas for her. The joys of being the second child, right? What does she need that we don’t already have?

And on top of that, I have to do at least a little early shopping because my sister isn’t coming back home for Christmas this year due to the crazy cost of flying and also her work schedule. That means I have to figure out what to get for her and her fiance, go buy it, and then ship it out East in time to arrive before Christmas. And her birthday is Christmas day, so I need to think of that gift too. No pressure!

Deck the halls, falalalala, I need another month.