Christmas Cheer

My kids are all in bed already, though none of them are asleep yet. I'm exhausted. I have a hundred and ten things I both need and want to get done in the next two weeks before Christmas and I have no clue when or how I'm going to accomplish most of them. I've been trying to keep in the holiday spirit, baking cookies with the kids, taking the whole gang to cut down a tree, decorating said tree as a family. Most of these events end in sheer disaster, with me pissed off and the kids all screaming and crying. Yet I push on. Tomorrow we are doing holiday crafts and baking cookies with a few of Ella's friends from school. I volunteered my house because the twins can sleep while we all work, though the thought of the mess that will be our house at the end of the day makes me want to cry. I'm so tired of cleaning, and I don't even really clean (I pay someone to do that for me, judge away). I'm tired of little people pulling out parts to 100 different toys and leaving them all over the house. I'm tired of never having all of the parts to any given toy or any game. I blame myself. They are still so young. That doesn't excuse them from picking up their toys, but lack or organizational skills leaves us with lots of pieces but no puzzle. I'm determined to clean out the playroom before Christmas. I want to put parts of toys together with their counterparts so that when someone gets out something to play they can enjoy the whole toy and [hopefully] not get frustrated by the missing parts and walk away. I'm just so darn tired! By 8:00 when everyone is in bed, I want to go to bed. I have been choosing bed over any of the other tasks I want to complete more often than not, and its showing in this house. Maybe its a bit of nesting setting in, but we are down to 14 weeks until this family of 5 becomes a family of 6 and we don't have anywhere to put Quatro. The guest room is becoming the twins new room and the baby will go into the nursery. That's the current plan. Only the guest room is currently our storage facility for all outgrown clothes and pretty much everything else in the house that doesn't have a home. We will have to find a new storage facility...within the house of course.

The one thing I have going for me is Drew's health. He still has the gunky nose I spoke of last week, but it has yet to hit his chest. Its been a real blessing not having to find time to talk to doctors and nurses and run into the office so they can check him out. I've spent more time at Children's Hospital in the past 3 months without him than have I have with him, and that's awesome. He has his next visit on the 19th and I hope that they're as happy with his health as I am. And of course I hope that we get a good culture report. It will suck if he's growing bacteria because he's been sounding so healthy. There is almost no cough anymore and his noisy breathing is essentially gone. The worst part about having a culture taken on the 19th is that we will get any bad results on the 23rd. I don't want to have to scramble the day before Christmas Eve to get him on whatever medication he might need. I don't want to have to have a schedule on Christmas weekend to administer antibiotics. I just want to have a stress-free, healthy holiday. Is that to much to ask?

I have to voice a complaint about one thing while I'm going. In the news this week, the FDA approved an over the counter drug that claims to cure a hangover. Perhaps a few years ago I would have thought that this was a great thing. However, when I see things like this in the news and think about how the drug that could save Drew's life is also at the FDA and just waiting in line for approval, it makes me furious that we are waiting behind drugs like these. I know that everyone has their cause and their issue that they're dealing with, but in my mind the system is seriously flawed when drugs that "cure a hangover" are placed in the same waiting line with drugs that "cure a genetic disease". I'm sorry, but people who take things to grow their eyelashes thicker or get Botox injections to "cure" a wrinkle have no clue what a real problem is. To spend hours every day doing breathing treatments to "hopefully" keep oneself from getting sick with irreversible lung damage or to take dozens of medications because your body doesn't produce the enzymes it needs to break down food, those are real problems. I wish the biggest problem we had was dealing with a self-induced hangover. So that's my beef. How can these things even be on the same playing field?! We need a new system because our system is currently broken. And i'll shout it from the rooftops, letting any and all decision makers know how I feel about it. One person can make a difference, and I'll prove it.

Finally, if you're in the market for Christmas movies this holiday season, consider buying them from any CVS, where $5 from every DVD sale will go to the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation.

Cheers!