Christmas Hoopla

My dear friend Kathy tagged me to write 12 random things about myself that revolve around Christmas. Hers were so cute and funny that I decided to go for it myself.
1. My Dad's side of the family has the tradition of everyone gathering for a soup dinner sometime around Christmas and after dinner we take turns reciting something we've memorized that has been meaningful in some way during the year. After each recitation, the person is allowed to choose one gift from the table (which we've filled by each bringing one gift). People sing, recite Scripture, recite poetry in other languages, recite their own poetry, and do dramatic readings. It is always quirky and fun.
2. Growing up, my sisters and I would each take a bag of candy from church at the end of the Christmas Eve service, take it home, dump it all out on the bed together and sort out the chocolate from the non-chocolate candy. The chocolate candy went into Mom's stocking, and the non-chocolate candy (mostly peanuts and peppermints) went into Dad's stocking. We've gotten a little more creative as we've gotten older, but we still prefer the brown bag stocking fillers :)
3. My Mom makes Christmas casserole for breakfast every year. She makes it on Christmas Eve, and bakes it Christmas morning and we all dig in while we open presents.
4. My family opens presents on Christmas morning in our pajamas, not much different than many families. But we have always been very careful that only one person is allowed to open a gift at a time (unless the gifts are the same).
5. Stockings are never hung on a mantle, we don't have a mantle. They are laid on top of the piano.
6. Amanda always walks over from next door around 10 am and she and I swap gifts on Christmas morning (this year she is in England...I don't think she'll be walking over).
7. Our church sings Silent Night on Christmas Eve, by candlelight, and at least once through in German.
8. Derek's family opens presents on Christmas Eve, and one year the neighbor boy across the street asked why they had opened all their presents already. Derek's dad told the kid that it was Christmas, and Santa must have missed his side of the street!
9. My first snowy white Christmas (in Shafter it is usually foggy white) was Christmas 2004, which was also my first Christmas away from home, and my sister Sarah came to stay with me and we made Christmas casserole to make it feel like home.
10. Putting the lights on the Christmas tree was always Dad's job. Making sure the lights worked before he put them on, was a job for us girls. We would sit and yank light bulbs out and try new ones for HOURS, so that we wouldn't have to drive all the way into town to buy a new set of lights.
11. I was always the first one to wake up on Christmas morning, and was usually unsuccessful in waking the rest of the house, so I would spend the first several hours of Christmas morning "inspecting the presents", making tunnels for the train around the tree out of gift boxes, and staring at the lights on the tree with the dog.
12. In my family someone always gets a movie for Christmas and we watch it as a family that afternoon as we clean up wrapping paper and continue eating casserole. The worst Christmas movie ever, was the year that I got "Babe, Pig in the City". There is a scene where a dog is dangling off a bridge by it's collar choking and it goes on and on and on. I ran out of the room crying. My Mom was shouting "Turn it off!" and Dad was shouting "Who has the remote?" and I never finished watching "Babe, Pig in the City".
And so I tag Jolene to complete her own list of Christmas Hoopla. I look forward to hearing it!

Restrictions

As a pregnant person, there are many natural restrictions, not all of which I have yet experienced. But I look forward (with trepidation) to restrictions such as not being able to see my toes, or not being able to shave my own legs, paint my own toenails, walk like anything other than a duck, sit down on the floor and not be able to get back up again, or get out of bed without a support beam. Some of the restrictions I have already experienced include not being able to eat the things I love, not being able to sleep through the night without having to pee at least once, and not being able to sit in a restaurant with other civilized people because the aromas wafting from the kitchen make me nauseous.
However, today I found out there are even more restrictions than I had at first imagined. And what makes them worse is that someone out there seems to be enforcing them. I don't know who it is, and I don't know where they are, but I know they are out there lurking, waiting for me to participate in activities that pregnant women are not "allowed" to participate in. I know this, because that's what the website said. What they will do to me when they catch me in the act is unimaginable...and the website doesn't specify, so I can only assume the worst.
According to the internet, I am no longer "allowed" to participate in activities that I may have formerly enjoyed, like ice skating, roller-blading, snowboarding, skiing, water skiing, jumping on the trampoline, sky diving, roller coaster riding, and recreational drug use.
Well now that you mention it all I want to do is wear rollerblades on the trampoline while I snort dope. All I want to do is sky dive off the top of a roller coaster while shooting up! The temptation is powerful...and yet I know that someone is out there waiting to catch me snowboarding behind a boat drinking beer...and that will be the end
With all these restrictions, what is a girl to do?

To Vomit

As a child I vomited infrequently, but much more than I have in my adult life. I am sure by now that I have caught up with my lifetime record, and surpassed it.
I think most of the people who read this already know that I am pregnant. And as a pregnant person, I have resumed some of my childhood disabilities including: not cleaning up my dishes after I eat off of them, leaving the room when someone is in the middle of telling me something, forgetting to complete a task I promised to have done by noon, laying on the couch while someone else worries about dishes, occasionally crawling on the floor to my bed or to the couch from my bed, using poor posture at all times of the day regardless of where I am or who I am with, eating whatever I want whenever I want it, and sitting in the shower instead of standing. All of these points of action are a result of my nearly-constant vomiting.
I will include a list of every place I have vomited since I found out I was pregnant, the list includes some embarassingly public places as you will see:
The dirt of a flower bed,
a rock garden,
the lawn,
a blue bucket (which I am quite attached to these days),
the kitchen sink,
the toilet,
the garbage can in my office,
the sink in a public bathroom,
the handi-capped stall of a public bathroom,
in my mouth on the way to a public bathroom,
the garbage can in the lounge at work,
on the sidewalk outside my apartment,
in the parking lot of a really fabulous biscuits and gravy place,
and in the car.
You will be happy to know that there are days when nothing at all comes up.
Here is a list of everything I've eaten today that has NOT come up:
A small bowl of Honey Grahams
A mug of water
two cucumbers
one 1/2 donuts
two bites of pecan sandy
a piece of licorice
two bites of raspberry yogurt
On a very good day I can sometimes even eat CHEESE, and drink GINGER ALE. On very bad days I attempt only saltines, and my menu frequently consists of all of 5 saltines, and some water.
This life sounds miserable I know. I've been living it and actually find it quite intolerable. But my good friend Kathy said it the best and I will repeat, for your benefit,
"There's no happier reason to puke, than being pregnant".

Opinions on Sun and Sleep

Who knew that sun could be so painful after so much fog? I have to admit I've been craving sun, but now that I've got it my eyes are hurting. I put a tablecloth over my desk to reduce the glare, but still, The Sunshine Room didn't get it's name for being kind to a person's retinas.
The nice thing about the sun is that it warms it right up in here. I'm sitting feeling very toasty in my black chair. I'm squinting at my computer screen, though, wishing for a moment (only a moment, oh forgive me for even saying it!), that the fog would return.
For the last three weeks I have gotten up at 6:20AM, put on my sweats, did some stretches, let Ally out of her crate, gotten a plastic bag, put on my tennies, and met Sarah at the door with the dogs. We are going for a walk. It is still dark outside when we begin walking, but usually the sky is bright when we get home.
One dark day Sarah could not walk, so I went by myself. Although by most standards no early-morning walk is a good walk, this was a particularly not- good walk. It was much too dark, and the majority of our walking group (both of us) later agreed that 7:30 is the ideal time to wake up in the Fall. Not 6:20. I did not walk far by myself before I traced my steps back to the warm, bright kitchen where a tea kettle was singing for my attention.
This weekend the time will change for real, and it will be an hour darker during our walks. I don't know if I can bear it. The overwhelming darkness. The black sky with no hint of the hills almost ready to release their captive flame. Oh, I will miss the sun.
But there is no doubt in my mind that I will enjoy something...I will enjoy my extra hour of sleep.

Fog

It is ironic to me that only a week or so after I had the shades removed from my office windows, we would have four days in a row of FOG. Now, normally I would embrace those foggy days after such a long hot summer. But this is strange fog, it's high and light....sometimes the sun comes through and you think you've gotten through the worst of it, and the fog strikes again.
Monday was the weirdest foggy day. I got to work at 7:30 and worked really hard. When I had completed a large portion of the day's assignments, I looked at the clock and it said, "8:00 AM". I was very depressed, and of course the oppressive fog wasn't helping. It felt unusually bright and then unusually dark. The sun was in the wrong spot. All day long, things felt wrong, sort of "off".
At lunchtime my disorientation was exacerbated by the fact that everybody was going to lunch early. The day was dragging by so slowly and now people were abandoning ship! What were they thinking? Didn't they know it was only eleven? Didn't they know how afternoon can stretch into eternity if you take lunch early?
I went with them.
I couldn't take it anymore! This day was lasting forever! Everything was wrong, and I was grumpy, and the sun was hazy and hidden. I silently swore off of Mondays before I told my boss, Andy, that some days, work is not fun. He probably even began to wonder if he had made the right choice in hiring me as I continued to moan about this Monday that is lasting forever.
At 2:30, I made a phone call. I knew that she would be in until three, so I procrastinated until the last possible moment. The operator answered the phone and asked if I wanted to leave a message. I questioned the operator's time clock and persisted, "She's in the office until three". The operator replied patiently, "Yes, and it's 3:30".
Ah, it's beginning to make sense.
Dumbfounded I hung up the phone and stared at my clock. I had been deceived! And any joy I might have gleaned from this day was stolen from me! To prove my resentment over the change in daylight savings time that my computer had not caught on to, I wrote this note "This clock is wrong! It is an hour later than this clock says!" and taped it to my computer screen.
That'll show it.