I’ve been a terrible blogger. I’ve posted what, twice in three weeks? Yikes.
I mentioned last week how I’ve had a lot of problems with WordPress since they upgraded me to the new version. That—on top of everything else that has been going on that I need to catch up on—was a huge deterrent to blogging. Thankfully, once I actually had a few minutes to sit down and look at it, I was able to find an easy fix through the support forums.
I feel like I fall into these periods of blogger slacking a few times a year. This time, it’s not because of writer’s block, it’s because there’s been so much going on and so much to catch up on that I’m actually overwhelmed. And sometimes that’s sort of paralyzing.
I don’t know that I’ll actually ever officially catch up, but I feel some sort of obligation to post a little bit about Christmas just because I always have and for my own benefit, it’s fun to look back on those posts year after year. So you’ll see that coming, albeit weeks late!
We have had A LOT OF SNOW. It started the Sunday before Christmas. We got several inches overnight, and in the morning we were compelled to take Nora out to play in it, really for the first time in her life. I actually gave Michael one of his sorely needed Christmas gifts early—a pair of Northface winter boots!—which ended up being a CLUTCH purchase because holy cow, in the couple of weeks since he has already gotten tremendous use out of them. My sister-in-law gave us a pair of hand-me-down snowpants for Nora to wear, and my mom bought Nora a pair of winter boots and mittens for Christmas, which she also gifted early so that we could go out in the snow. We actually feared that it might be our only chance (based on last year’s mild winter)… HAHA! Boy, we had no idea.
I figured that taking Nora out in the snow could go one of two ways: Badly or wonderfully. Thankfully, it was the latter. She freaking loves the snow, you guys.
We brought a basket of her sand toys out there and she was delighted.
We were lucky enough to get a fresh coating of snow—nothing major—overnight on Christmas Eve, so we woke up to a wonderfully white Christmas. Yay!
And then the dumping started.
My dad drove up on Christmas Day, thankfully, because if he had chosen to come any other day that week he probably would’ve been screwed. The snow started in the late afternoon on December 26 and we got a huge storm—1-2 inches per hour—that lasted through the night. When we woke up the next morning, I stuck a yard stick in the snow outside on our deck, and, well… see for yourself.
That’s close to 15 inches, folks. And it just DID NOT STOP SNOWING. My poor dad—the warm-blooded Virginian that he is—he had not seen snow like this in a really, really long time. In the week he was here, we accumulated a good TWO FEET of snow. We still have most of it out there, too. Fun times.
Fortunately, we didn’t have to try to commute anywhere in this mess, because we took off of work. We did venture out a few times, though—one afternoon, Michael, my dad and I took Nora and met my brother and Hunter at a nearby sledding hot spot for the kids’ first sledding adventure.
It’s a pretty big hill, so we went down with Nora every time. I thought maybe she’d be scared, but when we’d reach the bottom, she immediately demanded, “More? More!” in her sweet little voice. Love.
It’s been a chock-full few weeks, even if some of those days were filled with a lot of little nothings. In other words, we’ve been buried.
I’m working on digging my way out. :)
I hope that everyone had a very merry holiday (to those who celebrate, anyway).
Things have been crazy for us. The week leading up to the holiday was a whirlwind. It was hectic at work, and hectic at home. The actual holiday itself was exhausting, so we have been laying low since then, trying to recover! My dad is up visiting as well, so I’ve been spending a lot less time on the computer.
This morning, our furnace broke. It is 27 degrees out and we have 1.5 feet of snow on the ground, so it’s GREAT timing (note my sarcasm). My brother is HVAC certified so he’s coming over to take a look at things. Hopefully it’s a cheap/easy fix so it doesn’t get too cold in here, eeek!
And then I logged onto WordPress to try to put up a simple photo of our Christmas card and discovered that I was automatically upgraded to version 3.5, and THINGS ARE BROKEN. I am having a lot of trouble posting, and in an effort to fix the problems, I’ve had to break other things. So as you may notice, things aren’t looking so hot around here right now. JUST WHAT I WANTED TO BE DOING TODAY. Ugh. Hopefully web developer hubby can come to the rescue sometime over the next few days. Until then, excuse me if things don’t look too pretty. Bear with me, eh?
I was wrapping up a meeting with my team on Friday when I just happened to go to CNN’s website. I saw the headlines about the Newtown shooting. At the time, they were reporting 20 dead, “mostly children.”
The most sickening feeling of grief immediately washed over me. I looked over and saw that same feeling on the face of the only other team member in the room who has kids.
It’s every parent’s worst nightmare.
I’m not saying that non-parents can’t feel the grief, too. I know that it’s a tragedy no matter what your family looks like. We all feel the sympathy and the weight of this crime because we’re human. But I think that when you have a child (or children) of your own, it’s worse because you actually go there in your mind. That love you have for your child—that scary, all-consuming, chest-tightening love—it means that you simply cannot.even.imagine living without this beautiful little being. And to actually allow yourself to think about that possibility? They are dark—the darkest—thoughts. But for us, they are not real. We can all shake it off and go cling to our babies and pray and swear to never let them out of our sights for as long as we live.
On Friday, twenty sets of parents were not so lucky. Twenty-six sets, actually. And countless other family members and friends who had parts of them ripped away for no good reason.
It’s incomprehensible. I don’t think we will ever stop asking WHY.
But as baffled and disgusted as I am with the shooter, I have also become enraged with the media.
Since when did it become OK to report oodles and oodles of RUMORS and SPECULATION as if they were facts, simply because you are trying to stay “up to the minute” and break the story before your competitors? I mean, I know this is not a new phenomenon, but with this situation, it seemed as if this problem was running rampant.
Take for example(s):
The shooter is identified as R*** *****. Hours later, it is confirmed that it’s NOT HIM at all, it’s his BROTHER.
The shooter’s mother is supposedly the motive behind the entire thing. She worked as a kindergarten teacher. He went into the school to kill her and took a whole lot of innocent women and children with her. That then changed to NO, nevermind, she was a teacher’s aide (or a substitute teacher, depending on who you were watching) but wasn’t working that day.
And then it became, Oh wait, nevermind, she has NO CONNECTION TO THE SCHOOL WHATSOEVER.
Then there was a report that the shooter had gone to the school earlier in the week and had an altercation with four adults there. Three of them were dead and one was not at school that day. But there was no truth to that AT ALL.
And see, if you happened to be watching the news when one of these things was reported and haven’t been following it closely since then? You could be spreading false information. THANK YOU, NEWS MEDIA. I just want to know, what is wrong with saying, “We don’t know yet. We DON’T KNOW why. We DON’T KNOW how.” What is wrong with “We don’t know”?!
And don’t even get me started on the assholes who weaseled their way into homes for exclusive interviews with TRAUMATIZED THIRD-GRADERS. (And yes, I do take major issue with the parents for allowing it, too.)
In so many ways, I hate what our society has become. HATE.
On the other hand, President Obama is taking the opportunity to try to make some changes, ones that I believe could only help, not hurt. I know there are two sides to every coin and I see and understand the arguments. But no one is trying to take guns away from law-abiding, sane citizens. No one wants to revoke your second amendment rights. But shouldn’t all gun owners gladly jump through a few extra hoops if it means that we can MAYBE, POSSIBLY make it a little harder for wackos to get their hands on these weapons? I don’t even necessarily believe that better gun control would’ve prevented this crime in particular—they were his mother’s guns, not his—but I have strong feelings against assault rifles. I don’t understand why anyone needs one, period.
At the end of the day, I don’t know that Obama will be any more successful at this type of change than anyone who has tried before him, but I would like to see someone at least try to fix what is broken here. I know that guns are not the only answer, but again, it seems like it can’t do any more harm.
Speaking of Obama… he cried on live television on Friday. He wiped tears away as he delivered a speech to offer condolences to this little Connecticut town that has been rocked. For the parents whose lives have been ruined. Some people criticized him for it, but I found it so comforting to know that the leader of the free world is not immune to this sadness. He has a heart. And it’s not weakness—he wasn’t up there crying as our president, he was crying as a father. It was hard not to cry.
And to continue my rant and focus on a completely different person… can we talk for a minute about Tom Brady? I don’t talk about him much anymore because I’ve seriously been THREATENED in anonymous comments on this blog for things that I’ve said (in jest) about Tom Brady in the past. But if you were watching Sunday Night Football last night, perhaps you noticed this yourself.
Before every NFL game yesterday, there was a moment of silence and/or a tribute of some sort to the victims of the Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre. At Gillette Stadium, they were launching 26 flares into the sky to honor each one of the people who have lost their lives. The camera hopped around to different players, coaches, people in the crowd—all looking somber, some with wet-looking eyes. Then, cut to Tom Brady.
Dude wasn’t even paying attention, and then HE BLEW AN EFFING SNOT ROCKET. Right in the middle of all of this.
Now, I’m no fan of Tom Brady’s, and I’ve made no secret of that. But I just have to ask—how can you defend that? This man is a father. How can you…? How did he…? I just cannot even…
But I digress. These are just a sampling of the things that have been running through my head since Friday afternoon.
For everyone who lost someone in that school on Friday—whether they were 6 years old or 56 years old—I am just so, so sorry. The nation mourns with them, and many of us struggle to continue on with our everyday lives, too. I had coworkers and friends who drove their kids to school this morning because they could not bear to put them on the bus. For me, I know that I am still lingering longer at Nora’s bedside each night, giving extra kisses, extra hugs, and extra “I love yous.” We know not the pain that these families are experiencing, but we do feel some semblance of it, just in knowing all too well what it is that they’ve lost.
Rest in peace, sweet babies. And to the heroic teachers and administrators… thanks for doing all that you did, and sacrificing yourselves in the process.
For our Christmas card this year, I was a little stumped for what to do with Nora. She’s a little too old to plop somewhere with good props, yet she’s too young to really stay in place and pose. And hey, let’s face it. All people really want is a cute pic. I know they pay nearly as much attention to the overall “design” of the photo or card as much as I do.
We still ended up doing a couple of Christmas card “photo shoots,” though. This was one of them, and although we got some really cute pics, we ended up going in another direction for our card (which I’ll share with you soon).
Nora was pretty happy that there were cookies involved. Not gonna lie.
She was a little upset when I wouldn’t let her eat ALL of the cookies on the plate. Apparently she didn’t understand that the extras were there only for photo styling purposes. Tough lesson for a 2 year old. :)
Love her and her Christmas jammies!
How do you approach your Christmas card photos? Do you take special photos just for the cards? Go with professional photos? Or do you just choose a photo you like from anytime during the year?
About
I'm Heather. I'm 33 and have been married to Michael for seven years. Together, we have two beautiful little girls we love more than anything, and a miniature dachshund who drives us crazy. I'm a full-time working mom who has very little time for my own "stuff" these days, like home improvement, cooking/baking, cake decorating, and photography. Despite the team not making the playoffs since 1999, I'm STILL a Buffalo Bills fan, which I think speaks to my loyalty AND sense of humor. I can't wait to pick up the pace with travel again some day... you know, when we're done being ruled by tiny fists. Welcome to my blog.
