Christmas With the Normal People

Happy holidays, friends!

We spent Christmas with my in-laws and by golly we were determined it was going to go well.  And it did, but only because we're all made of pure awesomeness and rose to the occasion.

 Adding to the normal mix of Adored Wife's physical infirmities and Social Hurricane's anxiety issues and Graphics Magician's thirteen-year-old annoyingness was my mother-in-law's sadly worsening memory issues.  It puts a lot more of a burden on my father-in-law, because Mom always did most of the organizing and planning for this sort of thing, and now she's simply not able any more.  We could of course have scaled back, but he'd decided that no, we were going to try to do all the family stuff we'd always done.  And it was fun but he was pretty worn out at the end of it and, much as he loves us all, I think he was about ready for us to leave when we did.

Adored Wife loves to cook and so she stepped up and took care of a lot of that end of things.  The way her nerve trouble works is that she can be active for a while, then go lie down for a while, then go be active for a little while longer and so forth.  Mostly she was up and down for the whole day.  Social Hurricane's sleep schedule was off which didn't help the anxiety issues, and Graphics Magician was in rare form with his excessive cleverness, so the two of them were getting on each other's nerves a little.  But we kept them both distracted pretty well.

Basement Artist had insomnia Christmas Eve, but that's okay because there was coffee.  We had lots of food and lots of presents, and we actually did have a lot of fun and laughter together.  But it took some concentrated amazingness on our parts to pull it off.

Hope all's well out there, friends, and God bless.

A Poem For Patience

Happy Monday, friends, and happy day after Christmas.  Unto us a child is born!

(For those of you who don't celebrate Christmas, thanks for reading, and may this find you and yours well.)

A Poem For Patience

Sometimes people try my temper.
Sometimes my family tries my temper.
Sometimes circumstances try my temper.
Sometimes my own foolishness tries my temper.

It doesn't help to lose my temper.
It rarely helps to lose my temper.
It sometimes.....no.
It never helps to lose my temper.
It never helps to lose my temper.
It never helps to lose my temper.

That is all.

What We Do For Christmas

We'll spend Christmas Eve and most of Christmas day with my in-laws.  We've done this for years.  It's about an hour and fifteen minute drive to their house, not at all bad.  We used to be fifty minutes away, and then for a few years we were six hours away, and now we're back to this distance which works out very well.  Our families are quite some distance apart so for years we've typically done Thanksgiving with my family and Christmas with Adored Wife's.

We've actually been very fortunate so far in that, except for that one interesting year when Social Hurricane was confined to a psychiatric facility in late December, we've had all three of our kids with us, and it'll be the same this time around.  We don't have any particular Christmas Eve traditions except for the surreptitious filling of the stockings.  There will be food, of course.

Christmas morning we get up at various times, do coffee and snacks, and have an official brunch around ten.  Stockings are fair game when you wake up in the morning (and were a much bigger deal when the children were younger) but we do present time together.  Then, we play with our presents, socialize, and eat a big meal usually around four in the afternoon before packing up and heading for home.

It's a little different when Christmas falls on a Sunday.  When I was a regular pastor, we'd have Sunday morning services (and a couple of times my in-laws have been to my house so that could happen.)  This year I'm taking Sunday off, and we'll keep to our usual traditions.  I feel odd not going to church on a Sunday but I have some family members who don't do well with change and I think it's probably kinder and wiser to stick to the tried and true.

But I hope and pray everyone out there has a very merry Christmas.  God bless, friends, and thanks for reading.

Adored Wife's Christmas Party

I'm writing this on a Sunday evening, planning for it to go out Monday morning.  That's a little closer to the wire than I like to get things but I've had a very busy time lately with work, Christmas and household stuff, and some other writing projects.  I'm not committed to a Monday/Thursday schedule, but it seems to be working out and I like to give both of my readers something they can rely on.

But yesterday Adored Wife threw a small Christmas party for friends from our various circles.  We invited a hundred and something people and had thirty or so who could make it, which is about par for a weekend in December.  We wouldn't have had room for a hundred people to park, anyway.  We could have fit that many in the house if they weren't fussy about personal space, though.

But, I digress.

AW has lots of chronic health issues, mostly related to nerve pain, epilepsy, balance, and various neurochemical troubles.  She manages to be pretty active despite all that but an hour's moderate activity usually involves two hours' recovery time.  I (as you may know) am wired as almost pure introvert; I'm not big on parties.  I'm fine with them as long as I treat them as obligations to be discharged but I don't do them for fun.

So, you know, we're not the most obvious "throw a party" couple.  But Adored Wife really wanted to host a party, because that's what normal people do.  And I'm very fond of Adored Wife, so I signed up for it.

And yesterday's party went honestly pretty well and we both enjoyed ourselves.  What with helping some friends move in the morning and then getting ready for, participating in, and cleaning up from the party I didn't get any downtime at all yesterday and AW was exhausted and in considerable pain last night and has been absolutely worthless today.  (Her own words.)  She's mostly slept and rested the whole day, with the exception of an hour or two in the afternoon when she moved around and did a few light chores, then went back to sleep on the recliner.

I asked her if it was worth it.  She replied that of course it was, and wants to do it again sometime soon.  She had a successful party and is very pleased with herself.

Maybe a trifle on the stubborn side, but I like her.

Hope all's well out there, friends, and God bless.

The Rules

We posted these in the kitchen.  They seem to be working.

THE RULES

1. No sulking, no tantrums, no flinging things around or snapping at people.  If you’re in a bad mood, we’re sorry.  Don’t take it out on the rest of us. 

2. If a family member is in a bad mood, do something nice to let them know you love them.

3. Actually, do something nice for a family member daily whether they’re in a bad mood or not.

4. Keep your stuff picked up, especially in shared areas.

5. Speaking of sharing, there’s only one television.  Learn to take turns and, you know, be nice about it.

6. The cat’s getting old.  Treat him gently.

7. Having said that, if you catch him on the island, feel free to squirt his disobedient feline self mercilessly.

8.  Communication is our friend.  Use the calendar, text, use social media, talk.

9. If you do something you shouldn’t have, apologizing is the way to go.

10.  Remember, we’re all in this together.

Be There For Each Other

One of the rules of the family is that we have to treat each other with at least a minimum of courtesy and respect.  We've had to make that as a rule, because, unfortunately, sometimes individual members of the family are dealing with their own issues and tend to get a little grouchy.

Not ME, of course.  I'm never anything other than the soul of compassion and consideration.

.......well, okay, maybe most of the time.....

.......well, maybe sometimes I'm a little stressed, too.  And when I'm stressed sometimes I take it out on those nearest to me.  It's very common, and it's not right.  Your family is a convenient target, and they can't help being your family.  If I'm rude to my neighbors or my co-workers or my friends, then I can be shunned by the neighborhood, I can get in trouble at work, I can lose friends.

If I'm grumpy with my family, the most they can be do is be grumpy back, and that makes for some unhappy home life.

So we try to be there for each other.  To try to cut each other some slack when we're having a bad day, and when we ARE having a bad day, we try to be at least reasonably polite and civil to our kinfolks.  We're blessed to be able to have our own spaces for the most part in our home, so we can retreat if we need to regroup, but it's a lot better when we can get along and show a little kindness.

Just something I occasionally need to remind myself and the family of.

Hope all's well out there, friends, and God bless.

Struggles With Weight

With the exception of Graphics Magician (an active thirteen year old boy with an insane metabolism who could stand to put on a few pounds), the family would all like to lose "a little weight."

I'm not, in this post, commenting about anybody's struggles but mine.

Here goes.

I don't struggle with weight loss.

I'm not trying to lose weight.  I've never tried to lose weight in my life.

I would like to lose some weight.  At this writing I'd really like to lose about eighteen pounds.  I'm about seventeen pounds below my top weight and my situation is far from desperate (I was solidly in the prediabetic range then and needed to do something) but I'm still carrying poundage that makes it harder to move and makes me feel a little unwell.

But if I made the choice to lose it, I could.  Not all at once, I'll grant you.  But if I started making sensible eating and activity choices, I could take off eighteen pounds in probably three months.  I base that on my previously demonstrated ability to lose twenty pounds in three months of behaving myself.

All I have to do is consistently make good choices.

And yet, you know, evidence suggests that hasn't been my pattern.  I wonder why.

No excuses, just being honest.  I've chosen not to lose weight.

I wonder if I'll start choosing differently.  It's really up to me, isn't it?

Hope all's well out there, friends, and God bless.

Social Hurricane Buys The Salt

As you might have read earlier on this blog, Social Hurricane suffers from occasional hallucinations.  She's reluctant to describe them, and we honor that preference--focusing on them isn't necessarily a good idea.  I have the impression they're monstrous.  Fortunately they're not active all the time.

Her coping mechanism is lines of salt.  She knows very well this is all in her head, but she can't make the monsters go away so she tells herself they can't cross lines of salt.  And this works.  When we find a line of salt at her closet door and at the door to her bedroom, we know the hallucinations have been active again, and this is her way of being able to sleep in peace.  They can't come out of the closet, they can't get into her room.

The other day I got home and there was a line of salt at the front and back doors, and at the basement door.  All I had to do was cock an eyebrow at her and she said, "yeah, bad night."

So,we just step over the lines of salt.  They've been there a few days but they're not in the way, and we don't even worry about it.  Graphics Magician had a few neighborhood boys over to play, one of them said something about the salt, and he responded something along the lines of "don't worry about it, my family's weird."

Which we kind of are.  But it works for us.

We go through a lot of salt.  But Social Hurricane's working steady and she pays for it.

Hope all's well out there, friends, and God bless.

Sometimes We Play

It was one of the rare sit-down dinners where everybody was home, everybody felt reasonably well and was in a decent mood, and nobody had any time pressure to go anywhere.  We could relax and enjoy each other's company.

We got into a napkin fight.

We use cloth napkins rather than paper--no particular reason, we just always have.  I think we got a set as a wedding present and it sort of went on from there.  They've lasted forever.

I don't remember who first threw a napkin at who, but it escalated pretty quickly and all five of us were throwing napkins with abandon back and forth.  The conflict raged, alliances were formed, then broken, as allies betrayed allies and former enemies made common cause.

Eventually the battle-passion ebbed and an informal ceasefire began to occur, broken by the occasional lobbed cloth and brief renewal of hostilities.

Slowly, order was restored.

.................................

Um.

........................I guess there's not much actual point to this post.

Oh, well.

Hope all's well out there, friends, and God bless.