again with the cleaning

I came home from a double shift to find 2 freshly bathed girls, a sparkling clean kitchen, and a husband ready to flip out on all of us. Nothing out of the ordinary.
For the record, me coming home from a double equals an hour past the girls' bedtime. I'll overlook it due to the fabulous hugs I got when I walked in.
However, now the husband has vanished, the girls are STILL up, and I have to be rolling out of bed in 7 hours so I can go relieve the folks who just relieved me. Gotta love being shorthanded.

Now it feels like Christmas

I was up until 2 this morning wrapping things and critically evaluating piles of stuff I've bought and never opened, trying to find things to give to mom, aunt, or stepdad.
Meanwhile this weekend, I've washed my children, most of the laundry, more dishes than I care to think about (been baking, so I have to clean what I use then in addition to the normal stuff)... and my husband has been forced into brushing the girls teeth and reading them stories last night. He was no help during creating last night's dinner, he was no help wrapping gifts, though he did get up and fry himself a hamburger at 12:30.
He's said all along this season that he's not doing Christmas, he's focused on house. I keep thinking I'll get something small from him but I'm trying to bring myself down from that because I bet he really didn't get anything for me. He got Sissy a computer thing (plug it into TV, play games while learning), and Dora books for Boo, but that was IT. I even had to buy the gifts for HIS family in Texas. (Well, he paid for the grownup giftswap stuff, but those were $20 total and tossed in with a trip to Target anyway. I got to cover the mall gift cards for our teenage niece and nephew.)
I hope he's feeling better about his bank account balances- mine have gone to hell. The house people have gotten $1350 from us, I gave husband $2500 to pay off a high interest account he has, so my buffer has gone way down. (yep, seperate accounts. just never combined them and by now, we figure we'd drive each other nuts with our habits.)
OK, 3.5 hours until going to Grammy's for Christmas! Haven't done DIDDLEY to get started on my day except read stuff online. Haven't even made the coffee. What's wrong with me?

Remind me why I'm supposed to be excited

Reverent, yes, I can do that. But excited? For what?
Maybe it's because I tend to give little gifts to the people I care about randomly over the course of the year. I just don't get super worked up for the actual 'gifting occasions'
Didn't help that I had to get up at 5:30am, get ready for work, then call at 6:40 (just before having to wake up my girls) to figure out if our firstshift guy made it back to Ohio. He did. So I called my mom, told her go back to bed, and then wandered around the internet for a couple hours until the girls woke up at 9.
The girls did get to open a present each from Santa, both got a monster-sized lip gloss. They were very pleased. Christmas with the family will be Saturday, even though I wound up not having to work and my stepdad did not get held at work. It's easier this way, at least now my husband has a chance of being awake and alert and maybe even pleasant!
The thing that's got me concerned now is our trashcan is almost full, and trashday just kicked around from Friday to Monday- so we have to go 3 more days with not much space in there. With New Year's, trashday will kick from Monday to Tuesday. Gotta love it. Pain in the arse to keep up with trashday, especially if you're not sure which holidays they take.

Christmas eve... or is it?

Our local family is fairly small- me, hubby, our girls, my aunt, my mom, her husband. Mom and Aunt are both retired. Hubby and I both work in the maintenance hangar, so holidays off only happen if the holiday happens to fall on the right day of the week. Mom's husband is a corrections officer, so he's in the same boat we are. This year, I'm the only one who has Christmas off.
However-
So many people in my department took the day off, we were going to be left with the 2 first shift guys and nobody on 2nd shift. One of them volunteered to work 2nd instead, so we'd have 1 guy on each shift. On a holiday, this should be OK.
Until goofball supposed to work 1st shift felt he HAD to go home to D.C. to pick up his girlfriend and fly back to Ohio with her. He's now stuck there, and we're stuck with no 1st shift. Since my stepdad doesn't get home until 3, I checked with mom and she was willing to watch the girls so I could pull the overtime.
By the time I got to her house to pick up the girls tonight, she and her husband had talked, and he's betting he'll get frozen (mandatory overtime) to cover 2nd shift at the jail.
So Christmas has been moved to Saturday, because we're all off then. So is it really Christmas eve? It feels like it, we went to church tonight (and only survived by ducking out to the multipurpose room to run and yell for the middle half of the service). The uber-plus to this is now I don't have to stay up all night wrapping presents- just 1 each for the girls since stepdad started talking to them about Santa bringing them presents tonight. He was rather stymied by where Santa would leave it- he wanted to say under the tree but we don't have one up. I chimed in that Santa would find a place to leave ONE present for each of them, and bring the rest to Granma's house for Saturday. Luckily, they agreed to that.
Oh crud, I gotta go wrap something.
Merry Christmas!

mornings

2 mornings a week, the alarm starts going off at 4:15. I have mixed feelings about these mornings. I generally don't manage to drag myself out of bed until much closer to 5 (sometimes after it), but that little time between when I get up and dressed and when I have to get the girls up and dressed is so peaceful... sit here browsing stuff online while drinking coffee.
2 other mornings a week, I do the same thing but 40 minutes later. Somehow it just doesn't have the same effect. Perhaps its the lack of sleep on the earlier days.
Ah well. Time to start the car, do makeup, and roll the girls out of bed all so we can leave the house by 6 to have me leaving Grammy's house by 6:35 so I arrive at work prior to 7.

at what price cleanliness?

I came home somewhat pleased with myself. I stopped at Target and bought (among other things) a strand of blue LED christmas lights so my girls could have SOME kind of decorations to look at. I walked in to a totally picked up and dusted living room and my husband scrubbing the sink. He'd already done the stove. This is both a good and a bad thing. I really appreciate that he cleans, heaven knows I wouldn't scrub everything that much. The problem is, when he's on a cleaning binge, he gets so focused that any distraction is cause for an explosion.
I've tried to get him to realize that we'd all be happier if he would save the cleaning for while the girls are sleeping, be it naptime or after bedtime. But he won't do it. He used to start the kitchen cleanathon just after dinner on one of his nights off, while I got the girls ready for bed, which led to extreme frustration for me when they insisted HE read them stories and HE insisted the sink and backsplash and rangetop needed scrubbed. So at least today he waited until naptime for the bigger jobs. But it left him tense and irritable the rest of the night. Doesn't help that Sissy has been trying everyone's patience for the past 2 weeks straight. He up and vanished while I was getting Boo's pajamas on her. Eventually he reappeared from the bedroom, and laid on the couch. He did not move. He did not speak to or even acknowledge the girls again, even as I had to go physically remove them from the bathroom where they were demolishing things in an effort to brush their teeth by themselves.
We have the appointment for our loan application tomorrow at 9am. I have to go to work at 7, then duck out to meet him at the place. I think he still needs to print out paystubs and a bank statement, and dig out last year's W2s. If I mention it, I'll get a nasty snarl at half volume. If I don't, the worry streak instilled by my mother will run rampant. I called him earlier this afternoon, while printing my stuff at work, and offered to print his as well. (He answered with a grunt.)
Ah, no wonder I poured myself a double size glass of wine. Yay subconcious, good looking out.
By the way, it is now 4 outside. Wind chill is -20.

BRRRR!!!!!

It was 34 when I left for work before dawn this morning.
It was 14 when I left work, just before dusk.
It was 10 when I left Target, 30 minutes after sunset.
and it's been howling wind all day! Current wind chill is -11.
I'm sortof sad I looked that up... now I won't want to let the dog out again!

let there be color

My house will be platinum grey, with slate shake accent and midnight blue shutters and front door.
I'm quite excited.
We nixed the fireplace in order to afford stainless appliances, but didn't like any of the refrigerators they offered so that will be the standard black.
I also was talked down from my Silestone countertop. I'm still somewhat sad about that, but I can live with vinyl pretending to be granite that we wound up with.
On the plus side, the options we selected today dropped the price by a thousand dollars.
I have a Bunny Boo again. Since it was cold (30) today when we were heading out the door, she got to put on her bunny hat. It has not come off since, even thru naptime. This is a common occurance, so common that I have not bothered to take pictures of the phenomenon since October.

No! No push button!

Now that Sissy (the 3yo) has learned how to type, it's even more frustrating trying to use the computer with her around. Boo just randomly hits buttons. Sissy aims for things, and if she's sneaky her word will mix in with mine. That or I get random 'w' or 'q' stuck in places.
I may have to hurt my mother in law. She got the girls some phone that theoretically teaches numbers and some shapes/colors in English or Spanish. It has 2 volume levels, but since the lower level is reached by having the switch in the middle position, the girls never put it there. I've been eyeing it, trying to figure out how to modify the speaker to mute it. No luck yet, it would involve totally opening the case of the toy and I don't have THAT much energy.
My other super annoying thing today is the christmas card that arrived from my stepmother. She used my previous married name, and addressed the thing to the XXX Family. She knows better, even if it's been months since we've talked and a year since she's seen us. (Father left her a few years ago, though they are still not officially divorced.)
On the plus side, today the mail also brought us the official signed by somebody important purchase contract for our new house. We're buying a new build, so tomorrow we go to the design center to choose colors and flooring and appliances and all that jazz. Can't wait.

what am I doing here?

I don't know what made me decide to click on the link to get my own blog... I've thought about it for awhile... whether or not anybody reads it, I think it may be good for me to get things out of my head. Make room for all the other junk up there.
Today's been fun so far. My sinuses are somehow tied into barometric pressure, so the big storm that blew in overnight caused me to wake up feeling like there were bricks in my face. I've been awake just over 6 hours and have taken 6 ibuprofen tablets, as well as a dose of Tylenol sinus. I still don't feel better. I can't keep up with the girls today, plus it's my typical laundry day. I've done 1 load so far, and need to go get that from the dryer.
So here I am, typing nonsense, when I should be downstairs folding whites.
On the plus side, Boo (20 months) has showed off several new words today: puppy, flower, and grape.
I think naptime is calling to me.