The Holidays Are Coming!!!
I hate to say it, but the stores have been stocked with Halloween costumes and candy for a while now, and I have even seen some stores with Christmas items! I feel like with each year, retailers rush it even more! I am not even ready to deal with the fact that summer is over and school has started (which I really need to catch up to reality because summer is in fact over and school is very much in full swing already!), never mind the thought of having to start Christmas shopping! Ugh!
Good thing is I have already figured out with the kids will be for Halloween. The joke is that my son Louis is “Louie the Lion” (although we don’t call him Louie otherwise, it is either Louis or Lou), and my son Anthony is “Tony the Tiger” (ditto, he is Anthony or Nee-Nee, not Tony). So we have a Lion, we have a Tiger, so naturally we should have a bear, right? So my son Joseph will be the Bear. And I would have liked my daughter Juliana to be Dorothy from the Wizard of Oz, but she is getting to “mature” to dress like her baby brothers, so she has decided on some Goth princess costume. Oh, joy!
With four kids including a newborn, I do not have the energy to get the Halloween decorations out. Well, I should say, my husband will be the one to get them out from the attic. So I do not have the energy to keep asking him to get up there to get the Halloween decorations down for me. He is a wonderful husband and Daddy, and although I do not stop from early morning until late at night with the kids and writing and working and taking care of the house, etc…, but he is out of the house all day and to climb the ladder to get into the attic and search out the decorations is something that needs to be done on the weekends instead of after work. But our weekends are constantly filled with parties and other social functions. But I will start asking tonight anyway!
Then the real rush begins. Thanksgiving will be here before we know it, and with that comes all the hustle and bustle of the holidays… Huge dinners, getting together with family, and shopping. And more shopping. And, you guessed it… even MORE shopping.
We have a big family. Everyone loves to give the kids toys (along with much appreciated winter clothes!) for Christmas. In the past, we overload the kids with toys as well; toys from us, toys from Santa. And last Christmas, with three kids, our living room looked like Toys R Us exploded in it. Then we needed to find homes for all of these toys. This year, we have four children to open gifts. My husband and I have decided to do away with the 97 gifts per child (I AM exaggerating, although not by much!) and focus on one larger gift for them instead. I would like to get my daughter a laptop, although she is still so young for anything that fancy. She just needs something to do homework on and play some games. She will be thrilled. For the twins, I was thinking of getting them either a swing set for outside (but they would not be able to use it until it gets warmer) or a television for their rooms, maybe with one of those interactive video play game sets. And for the baby, since he will only be three months old, I can pretty much get him anything and he will be happy with it!
I like the idea of gift certificates for my parents and my husband’s parents. I can probably get away with gift certificates for the siblings as well… Then for everyone else, I usually resort to an updated photo of the kids in a nice frame. Yes, the holidays get very expensive in our house!
I am getting tired just thinking about all of this! And through it all I will be healing from a C-Section and learning to manage four kids, three under two years old. Well, there’s no use whining over it. The holidays come every year, I should try to better prepare for them earlier in the year. Like maybe January!
Last year’s holiday photo, minus baby number 4. They all look so little!
Jennifer
Mom to Juliana (7), Louis (1) and Anthony (1)
Expecting #4 in September!
www.nevaland.com
This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 14th, 2009 at 3:30 am and is filed under Holidays, Jennifer. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.