Random Thoughts Thursday

Why is Christmas shopping for a 6-year-old so hard? I have almost everything for Vicki, and for Ellie it's just a matter or narrowing down the many many options. But for Lexi...I struggle. To give in to the budding Hannah Montana insanity or not to buy anything Hannah Montana, that is the question.

Why do my children insist on torturing me with their choices for school clothes each morning? I have Lexi, who wants to wear the orange summer dress with the burgundy corduroys underneath ("but Mom, you said I had to wear something under this so it would be weather-appropriate!"), and Vicki, who insists on wearing her nicest church dress and a fake pearl necklace on P.E. day. I absolutely cannot wait until next year when they have uniforms!

I love amazon.com. Christmas shopping in my jammies without looking like white trash...priceless.

Oh, and I love tracking my orders. It's so fun to see where your stuff is at random times of the day. And the different (and sometimes random) routes they take to get here. Why couldn't they just send everything together, anyway? It's all coming from Phoenix, and it was all shipped on the same day, but one package went by way of Las Vegas and Sparks, NV before heading up I-84 through Boise, while the other one went by way of Salt Lake City to Boise. Weird. But they're both supposed to be here today! Woohoo!

What am I going to do if the packages come when the big girls are home? Okay, I know what I'll do, but then they'll know there's stuff in the house that they're not supposed to know about. I may need to find a better hiding place.

Ellie can't say cucumber, either. There's no easy way to spell this phonetically, but she pronounces it "come-cue-mber". I discovered this when she was telling me about Bob and Larry (from Veggie Tales), and I said, "Oh, Larry's the pickle, right?" She laughed and said, "No, Mommy! He's a comecuember! Wait, I mean a cumumber. No, I mean...oh, I can't say comecumber!"

I so glad we budgeted for this year's Christmas at the very beginning of the year. That means that the money's just been sitting there all year untouched, and since we still have enough for our daily needs we get to really have fun with Christmas. Next year will probably not be so good (really really not), so I'm enjoying it while I can.

Why is it that the girls can't seem to get their clothes into the dirty clothes hamper no matter how big it is? It's like they think the closet floor is close enough. Now the closet has no floor and Vicki swears she heard something alive moving around in there. I honestly wouldn't be surprised. It's not a pretty sight. And yet they wonder why they never have clean socks.

This morning Ellie told me she wanted "peanut butter toast" for breakfast. I put it in quotations marks because she specified that it not be dark and crunchy, just light and squishy, and not peanut butter, just plain butter. But she kept insisting it was still peanut butter toast. If we'd made a sign, we'd get to post it here.

I can't believe how much I actually enjoy getting up at 5:30 every morning. I can't stay up much past 10:00 anymore (and sometimes I don't even make it until then), but I love the peace and quiet and the fact that if I'm already showered and have eaten breakfast before the girls get up we do a whole lot less rushing to get ready for school on time. And I'm reading the New Testament straight through for the first time in my life and I love it.

I won't say anything about chocolate in this post.