Crunch Time

This time of year really gets me going…and not in a good way.  The stress of Christmas always gets to me and this year it seems to be worse than ever.  A lot of the stress is coming from the fact that I leave Friday for a 4-day weekend out of town.  Not only is it the last good shopping weekend before Christmas (you won’t see me out shopping on the 23rd and 24th!) but I’m leaving my precious, sweet, little child for 4 days.  I was ok with it until yesterday, when I started getting teary-eyed every time I thought about it.  So, in my ordinary avoidance fashion I’m just trying not to think about it.  Apparently it isn’t working so well because the tears are welling up again.  So, on to other things.

I’ve been running errands like a mad woman during my lunch breaks this week.  I have so many Christmas gifts to buy still and I’m running out of time to order them online.  So, I’m doing what I can in the short hour I get for lunch and grabbing whatever fast food is nearest the store I need to go to.  Yesterday that meant McDonald’s.  Today it was Taco Bell.  Those are great for the diet which (obviously) isn’t going so well these days.  I also caved and picked up a new pair of jeans (a size bigger) so that I won’t be sporting a muffin top when I hang out with my BFF this weekend.  That almost brought tears too.

Besides the gifts I have yet to buy and the ones I need to get shipped before I leave, I also decided it would be fun to make some of the gifts this year.  I got a new sewing machine a while back and I’ve been having a lot of fun making things out of fleece lately.  So, I decided to make two of my nephews fleece blanket and pillow sets for Christmas.  I just didn’t realize that I was going to be so crunched for time.  I spent the majority of the night lastnight hidden away in the guitar/sewing/spare room working on those.  I actually finished both blankets and one pillow before finally making myself go to bed at 11:30.  Hopefully tonight I’ll get the second pillow finished and get my Christmas cards ready to mail out.

At some point I suppose I should also get to wrapping some gifts.  It might help if I checked to see if I even have any wrapping paper too.  I think I have some left over from last year but it might not be enough.

At least one holiday stressor seems to have been lifted.  My in-laws told us that they were going to be coming up for Christmas which was really stressing me out.  Besides the fact that I have no idea when I would get my house cleaned, I wasn’t really up for rearranging the plans that I had already made for Christmas and Christmas Eve.  I enjoy being around family on the holidays, but we already had plans made to be with my family and adding even more people just seemed a little chaotic to me.  Lastnight my mother-in-law told me that they didn’t think they would make it because it would be cutting too close to the trip to Hawaii (where we will all be together anyway).  I know Hubby was looking forward to them coming, and I’m sure Zach would have enjoyed it too but this will just make things a little more simple on Christmas morning which is how I wanted it to be.

To top it all off, Hubby and I got into a big argument lastnight over something totally stupid.  I’m still steaming over it today even though I know I should just let it go.  I feel really bad because I know that if I wasn’t already stressed about other things it probably would have just rolled off of me and the whole argument never would have happened.  The worst part of it was that we argued in front of Zach and it wasn’t at all constructive.  I always said I would never do that and this certainly isn’t the first time it has happened.  I feel really bad about the whole thing, but of course I still feel like I was right.  Isn’t that just the way it goes?