12 Stuff Ups of Christmas

On the 8th day of Christmas my true life gave to me…too much time and a little perspective. I hope you sung that in your head. I did.

I adore Christmas I just do. And Christmas Day did not disappoint this year. There was delicious food, great company and a pool. I didn’t want to leave and that is very unlike me. Mr 6 is like me and even he didn’t want to leave. Ok he was asking to towards the end but then he hopped back in the pool again and did not want to get out again.

In direct contrast to Christmas Day passing way too quickly, every day since has been at least two days long. This is partially due to the twilight zone that is the week between Christmas and New Years, and partly because I fought with my husband and smoked again and now I’m having to do the whole withdrawal thing again.

The third reason I’m struggling through the day is that my kids (mostly Mr 6), demand my attention all. The. Time. And I do not have many excuses not to give it to them.

Every day this week Mr 6 has woken me somewhere between 7 and 8 am, regardless of how late I let him stay up. If I let him stay up late he doesn’t sleep longer he’s just extra emotional. And he doesn’t like to be alone and he likes to talk a lot, even first thing in the morning.

Even if I wake up feeling fresh as a daisy and ready to greet the day, after ‘blah blah blah, Pokémon, Blah, blah, blah minecraft’ and a couple of science and maths questions, I’m feeling very drowsy.

Miss 9 is pretty much nocturnal in the holidays so she can’t help to entertain Mr 6. It’s better in days when we get out of the house for a while but only marginally and there’s always way too much day left when we get back.

Take today, for example. Mr 6 and I woke about 8 and had our usual chocolate milk and cartoons. Mr 6 reminded me that I promised to get him a binder for his Pokémon cards (mostly because I’m sick of his cards all over the living room.

We quickly got dressed and headed to the shops. He found the binder he was after ($30 plus 75c per plastic sleeve wtf). And we headed to do the grocery shopping.

Half the lights turned out and the music stopped just as we started shopping. Mr 6 looked freaked out but I remembered seeing something on Facebook about ‘quiet shopping’ time for people with additional needs happening for an hour each day and told him this.

Mr 6 asked about Autism for the 100th time and I tried to explain again. If anyone has a link to a good YouTube clip for kids on the topic I’d be grateful because I still think he doesn’t get it.

Despite not knowing what it was all about Mr 6 was very respectful and talked quietly to me after our conversation. He still danced around the trolley dramatically but no one seemed to notice.

After a relatively pleasant shopping trip I decided to treat us to some Sushi (or as Mr 6 calls it Shoe-sea’). Which at $25 for a family of four to have a big feed is one of the cheapest and healthiest takeaways I reckon (I know there’s too many carbs but it’s not the worst).

So you’d think it would be at least lunch time by the time we got home, yeah? Wrong. It was only 11 am. It was a good day but also felt like, why is it not done yet?

I watched some pointless TV I don’t even recall while Mr 6 organised he’s Pokémon cards, explaining to me what type they were all as he did so and trying to seem interested, but not too interested, lest it lead to more Pokémon talk.

Finally I woke Miss 9 and we had our Shoe-sea. Then Miss 9 took Mr 6 to her room to play with her dolls.

Hubby was doing some shopping of his own, so left to my own devices I decided to watch Promethius, a sci-fi thriller about one of my interests, ancient aliens. Not bad but a bit gorey for my tastes and especially for the kids who can not seem to leave me alone fir longer than a half hour. So I did the responsible thing and told them to cover there eyes and reminded them ‘it’s all fake’.

Miss 9 was reminded of her favourite alien movie, Avatar, so we watched that next as I napped, because, isn’t this goddamn day over yet?

When I woke it was 5 pm and I made us an early dinner and decided to take the kids to the park to burn off some of there energy and give me something to do. They instantly made best friends with the kids there, who seem to be living in their car. Which made me feel like a bit of a jerk.

Honestly I don’t have much to complain about. I have a roof over my head, we’re all well fed and get what we need and mostly what we want. And though my kids are jerks to me half the time they are good friends and I’m actually pretty proud of that.