Family

Putting Away Christmas

By / January 1, 2010

Some years I am so eager to be done with the holiday season that I take down the tree on boxing day. Those years I am in a hurry to reclaim my front room and normality from the clutter of tree, nativity, and seasonal books. Other years I want to savor the holiday feeling for a more extended period of time. This year the need to un-decorate sneaked up on me. It dawned on me slowly that today is New Year’s Day and that my front room is still full of Christmas. Some time before Monday morning I need my front room to not be full of Christmas anymore. I need to hit the ground running on Monday because the first of the year accounting is looming and I’ve got a list of business contacts to refresh.

Knowing the job needed to be done, I decided that the sooner it was done the better. So I rallied my reluctant forces and we began to un-decorate. In this case the forces were my kids. They are always enthusiastic about decorating and completely uninterested in putting things away. (This is also true with most of their toys, but that is a problem for a different day.) I started by requiring them each to remove 50 ornaments from the tree. Thus I discovered that we own approximately 150 ornaments. I’m not sure what I’ll do with this little factoid, but there it is. Mostly I was pleased to have all the ornaments transferred from tree to box in less than 10 minutes. The tree itself was carted downstairs and shoved into the giant duffel bag we use as storage.

At that point I released my minions from bondage and they fled back to their games. The rest was up to me. The tree is our big Christmas effort. Everything else fits into three boxes. This year I decided to organize and sort as I put things away. It is a small gift that I am giving to my next-December self. She will discover less chaos in the Christmas boxes, which is a good thing.

The boxes are all stowed. The various debris have been swept. The furniture is put back in the regular locations. My front room feels light and spacious. Over the next few weeks various Christmas items will surface from odd corners of the house and I will shove them into the tops of the Christmas boxes. We’re ready for what comes next.

The Writing on the Calendar on the Wall

By / December 29, 2009

My calendar is three feet by four feet and it hangs on the kitchen wall. All of the months are laid out in a grid; each with its own square foot of space. This is where I write the family schedule in multi-colored inks, one color per person. I spend a lot of time standing in front of the calendar. It allows me to quickly review a week, or a month, or a year, as I’m planning ahead to see what will fit, and what will not fit, into our lives. Each day gets about a square inch of space. It is common for the entire inch to be filled with a rainbow of notations about what is to happen that day.

Today I ventured out into the snow covered wilds to fetch the calendar for next year. Upon my return, I sat down with the pens and noted all the scheduled events of which I am currently aware. It used to be that a new calendar stayed mostly empty, only filling up as each month drew near. It was like a wave of scheduled events which rolled across the blank squares. It doesn’t work that way anymore. The wave is still there, but the empty is not. I have events scheduled through November of next year. Our path for the next year is set, complete with wayposts and planned respites. All of it is waiting for the wave of little events to roll through and fill up the gaps.

From now until that mythical day when we’re not so busy, I will be working rear guard action. I must defend the white spaces on the calendar. Because those blank days are not empty days. They are days which are full of the mundane things which don’t get written on calendars. I have to leave time for us to do laundry, and read stories, and clean house, and go to the park, and sit still. There has to be time for the boring stuff, which is the important stuff that we remember best.

I will not always be able to keep spaces empty. I can already see a couple of months that are going to be insanely busy. That happens. That is why it is all the more important to defend the spaces that I can defend. Defending the spaces means not volunteering for things even though I have the skills to get them done. It means telling people no. It means setting aside some of my shiny ideas indefinitely. It means making choices about the activities in which we choose to participate. Turning down an obviously good thing so that I can keep a day empty feels backward, but I have to do it.

My new calendar is on the wall now. In two more days it will be this year’s calendar and the adventure will begin.

The quiet of Christmas Evening

By / December 29, 2009

I was going to write a post called “The Art of Christmas Day” in which I detailed all the planning, pacing, and managing that Howard and I do to make sure that Christmas Day runs smoothly. I even wrote out all the notes, complete with the psychology behind our choices. I may write that post tomorrow, just now I’m too tired. And I’m feeling wistful/thoughtful after watching UP rather than amusing or logical, which are the moods required for the other post.

Still love that movie. It makes me cry every time. It also makes me want to write a list of Stuff I’m Going To Do. For now I’m going to go hug all my kids a couple of times each.

I hope you all had a marvelous day. And remember sometimes the boring stuff is the stuff you remember best.

My little boy has run out of ‘little’

By / December 29, 2009

Yesterday I was standing next to Link when his voice wobbled. For just a moment his voice changed timbre and dove downward. It was so fast. Link certainly didn’t notice. He kept talking and it did not happen again. But I heard it. And Howard heard it.

Today I gave Link a haircut. His hair is solidly and definitively brown now. It used to be bright blonde. He’s lost the last of his baby teeth, and when I hug him, I can’t see over the top of his head anymore.

I have this memory of him at three years old, running across the lawn with the toddler run that goes up and down as much as forward. He had a little blue flower clutched in his pudgy fist. He proudly presented it to me, even though the stem was broken and the flower flopped over.

I miss that little boy. Link misses being that little boy. But I wouldn’t trade the Link I’ve got. He’s earned every one of his inches and smarts.

Seeing the good

By / December 22, 2009

At three hours into the holiday break, it was looking like a bust and I was ready to send kids back to school. I’d even written up an entertaining/complaining list comparing the number of hours on vacation to the number of tantrums. But then things got better. I finally got back to my blog entry and realized that the mood had passed. I no longer feel like complaining. Instead I feel all cozy and happy.

It is hard for people to see outside their current mood. This afternoon Kiki was furiously mad at the thoughtlessness of teenage boys. She was also mad at most of the rest of the world for daring to exist while she was angry. I knew that the mood would pass, but she could not believe me. Neither could Gleek who spend most of the time I was cooking dinner bemoaning the fact that I was not cooking something else. And then I could not see out of my mood where I wanted to complain about my kids.

But here we all are and life is much better. It usually gets better if we just try. I need to remember that before I write a blog entry which records the day as awful. The whole day was not awful, just a few hours of it. The rest has been good.

Winter Break is Nigh

By / December 20, 2009

On one hand, I am glad I have two more days to get work and writing done before the kids are home all day. On the other hand, I really don’t want to get up early tomorrow. I want to make the kids get up early even less than I want to get up early myself. Most mornings I have to physically wrest the covers from them before they’ll get out of bed. And then there is the problem of breakfast. The kids have an array of dietary preferences. I can either fix multiple meals in order to save on arguing, or I can fix a single meal and weather the complaining. Neither one sounds like much fun at o-dark-thirty in the morning.

BUT, the holidays are near. I will get to sleep in. They will get to sleep in. We will all have a break from homework and routine. It will be good right up until we all start feeling cabin fever and are ready to take on a new year. Then we will be back to schedules and checklists. I will be newly happy because I will remember what chaos ensues when the routine is AWOL.

For tonight, I need to sit in the light of the softly glowing tree and feel glad for a quiet hour.

Christmas Status Update

By / December 18, 2009

One week to go. (The kids make sure I am appraised of the count down daily. As if I might forget.) I ran out today to buy the last Christmas gift. (The remainder are things I must bake.) I have already had my bout with Christmas over-whelmedness. (Yes I made that word up.) I did the fretting over how much we are spending. I worried that we were getting too much for the kids. Then I worried that there might not be enough. Hopefully I can now move on toward the blissful feeling that all will be well. There are still things to do. People continue to order and I must ship the packages. I have an essay that consumed most of my attention for today, and it is still not finished. But this evening I am putting down all my Things to Do and visiting with a friend. There will also be food. It is good.

Dreaming of Grandpa

By / December 17, 2009

I dreamed of my Grandpa today. He died eleven years ago this month. It was the normal sort of mish-mosh dream that I have when I take a long nap in the middle of the day. Then Grandpa was there. He was awake and alert. He spoke with a clarity that he lost some time in my early teens. I don’t remember most of what he said despite the fact that I tried to hold onto it as the dream dissolved into consciousness. All I retained was a sense of his presence and love.

I’d like to believe that my Grandpa came to visit me, that he was really there. This is not the first time I’ve felt visited by people who are gone. But whether it was a visit, or the scattered dreams of someone who has been thinking of her Grandparents lately, it was still a good dream. It was nice to see him again.

Holiday Shipping, Business, and Family

By / December 15, 2009

Yesterday was the US postal service’s busiest shipping day of the year. We here at Chez Tayler have been doing our part to add to the load. I’ve been shipping out 5-15 packages per day for the last week or so. This is not a surprise to us. In fact we’ve kind of been counting on it this year to help us make the ends meet until we can release the next Schlock book. In another week I’ll be able to do the math and see how much gap is left. I’ll also do the math to see how Christmas spending added to the gap.

I enjoy the Holiday shipping. It has a cheerful urgency to it. I love looking at the invoices and seeing when the billing address is different from the shipping address. Then I know what I’m sending is a gift. It is a gift to us as well. Every package we send is a gift to us from the Schlock readers out there who enjoy the comic enough to spend money. I sometimes wish I could thank them all. I put a Thank You post card into each order, but it hardly seems like enough.

Things do not always go smoothly. People email me with questions. This year I’ve had multiple inquiries about merchandise for which we’ve run out of stock. That makes me sad because I know the other person is disappointed. I am much happier when the problem is one I can solve by sending out a replacement or filling a special request. I know that the time will come when we are too busy to manage special requests, but that day has not yet arrived. The more I interact with customers, the more impressed I am with Schlock readers. They are courteous, patient, and understanding of our human errors. I even had one guy who replied with startlement that I was the one to answer his email personally. This amused me because I realized he did not know how small our operation really is.

Today I had to assemble more boxed sets to fill out the orders. Six year old Patch sat with me as I slid books into boxes. He’d wanted to help slide books into sleeves, but sometimes the books require coaxing to slide into place. Instead I handed him the note cards which are included in each set. As I finished each box, he would slide card into place. Then he lined the sets up very carefully. Eight year old Gleek was the one who helped with the shrink wrapping. She likes to run the heat gun which makes the plastic fit tightly over the sets. Then we cleared all of it off the kitchen table so that dinner and homework could take place.

As I restocked the shipping table in the unfinished storage room, I pondered once again the cottage industry we are running. In some ways what we have is the re-invention of the family farm. We have busy seasons and slow seasons. My kids measure their lives by these business seasons as much as they do by the seasonal weather outside. They remember the times that Mom and Dad are distracted and pushing to send a book off to print. They like book shipping because it provides work they get paid to do. Shipping season is also celebrated for the treat foods we eat because Mom and Dad are too busy to cook. Convention season is frequently hectic and often involves over night stays with friends and relatives. In our lives, business and family are all tied up together. I like it that way even if it is chaotic at times.

I sometimes wonder how my kids will look back on our family life. Will they consider it as an ideal to live up to, or will they take from it things that they do not want to replicate? I hope they’ll do both. For now we have orders to ship.

Link’s Teeth

By / December 15, 2009

Link came trudging toward the car after school, shoulders slumped, eyebrows fixed into a scowl. He met my eyes and for just a moment I saw the corner of his mouth quirk up. That was the only clue that all might not be as it appeared.

“Mom. I had a terrible day.” Link flopped himself into the seat next to me.

“Oh? I’m sorry to hear that. What happened.”

Link hunched over a little bit more. “I lost six teeth.”

This was nowhere on the list of probable causes for a bad day. Also, had I heard right? “What?”

“I lost six teeth.”

I looked over at my son. There was no sign of the slight smirk. He was looking at me, deadpan serious. Part of my brain was still convinced that I’d heard wrong. I knew he had a wiggly tooth. Losing a tooth would not be surprising, but six? Really? Then Link grinned at me. There were four teeth across the front surrounded on either side by huge gaps. Link also held up a little ziploc bag containing the teeth in question. Six teeth in one day.

A closer inspection showed that the new teeth are already showing through. Link won’t have the big gaps for very long. This is good, since he’s discovered that chewing is a bit of a challenge at the moment. Also he is very pleased with himself. Not only did he lose more teeth in one day than anyone else we’ve ever known, but he fooled his mom with the “I’m having a bad day” schtick.

Edited to add: The lost tooth count is up to seven. Link just pulled out one on the bottom. This one was not quite as ready to let go as the top teeth. Link was just enthusiastic. None of the rest are even remotely wiggly and I have commanded him to leave them alone. I guess he was just overdue on losing a bunch of teeth.