·:[ Peanut Butter Mom ]:·
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It seems like the holidays were a whole lot more fun when someone else was in charge of making the magic. Presents, cookies, parties, cards - ugh, I’m exhausted!

Nana spent her holiday with the other grandkids in the Northwest, and Jelly Dad and I headed to California for his parent’s anniversary celebration and Christmas. I made 5 batches of cookies/candy and 2+ trays of finger sandwiches, in addition to doing lots of dishes and cooking lots of appetizers. I don’t cook or do dishes that much at home in a week! (thanks to Nana, my meal prep place, and Jelly Dad, of course)

It was good to be with family for the holiday, but traveling with 2 children under the age of 5 plus way too many presents was a burden. Plus, even though I still had to do a lot of the footwork to make the magic happen, it was like being a guest at someone else’s Christmas.

Princess and Trouble had a great time, though, and I think that is most important. Then again, I sure could use a spa day about now.

The HR part of me loves this idea - a performance review for parents!  I suppose I’ll have to wait until the kids can read, but what a great idea to keep in your family files.

Go to the article from Good Morning America

I logged onto the Womans Day website today to try to win a new washer / dryer (I certainly do enough laundry with the kids to need them!), and this is what they’re advertising on their website - Girls Gone Wild videos.

I certainly appreciate many of the articles in my Womans Day magazine, and have never seen them advertise such inappropriate material in the print version.

What on earth are they thinking!?!?

Just how many of their readers do they think would buy that trash? And do they really think the rest of us won’t find it offensive?

Maybe they don’t have an effective way to control who advertises on their site, but it seems to me they should work harder to find a way.

I haven’t mentioned yet one last member of our family - our Golden Retriever, Bandit.  He’s a good guy and he’s lived with us since he was a puppy.  Bandit was really our first kid - the one who gave me the confidence to believe that I really could handle all this Mom stuff.

Last summer he was diagnosed with lymphoma, and at the end of 2006, we had just finished up a long course of chemo along with radiation treatments.  Bandit went into remission early, tolerated the chemo treatments well, and from all indicators we felt we’d probably get the long end of the 1 to 1 1/2 year survivability rate (they can’t cure the cancer, but they can buy you time).

Yesterday I took him in for his first monthly maintenance treatment, only to find out that he’s already out of remission.  I’m heartbroken.

The worst of it is, if we continued with a more aggressive (and expensive) chemo schedule, we could probably continue to buy some time.  The problem is, we just don’t have the money.  We committed to the first course of chemo and got the radiation half price through a study at the vet school - we had decided that even though it was a big financial pinch, we wanted to do it for Bandit.  We even had the pet insurance to help out a bit.

But now the insurance payout is exhausted, and so are our resources to commit to more treatments.  Yes, the end is the same - Bandit will never be completely cured in any case.  I just feel miserable that I don’t have…  don’t have what?  More money to throw at the problem to make me feel less guilty?  More time so Princess and Trouble will remember Bandit as more than just that dog in the pictures from when they were little?

Anyone have the winning lotto numbers??????

If the constant presence of snow for the last 7 weeks wasn’t enough to beat it into my head that it’s winter, now we’ve hit the “season of the sick”. Princess has a runny nose (not that that’s going away until summer, and even then it’s still unlikely to be completely gone), and Nana has the crud which she is certain to have gotten from Trouble who still seems to have it, and who spent 3 days at home with Nana the week before last with a fever and another day at home this last week with a different malady.

A gross malady - a barfy malady. In the car on the way to daycare, on the floor after dinner, and all over himself, me and his bed at 4:00 in the morning on Thursday night. Is it any wonder I need coffee to get through my workday?

Of course, Trouble becomes “Velcro Baby” whenever he’s sick. Don’t even think of trying to set him down. He’d much prefer to sleep on your shoulder, but if you do manage to get him to sleep in his bed, you’ll be hard-pressed to manage to sneak out of his bed without him waking up.

He’s really a basically healthy guy. Despite the 3 days we spent over his 1st birthday in Children’s Hospital with a Strep/Mono infection, Trouble is blessed not to have any major health issues. That said, he is still proving to be “the sickly one” in our family. The aforementioned hospital stay, the recurrence of the Strep/Mono a couple weeks later, several ear infections, the viral infection from a couple weeks ago and other assorted colds have earned him this bad reputation.

These are the weeks I’m glad to be in our multi-generational home. Thank goodness for Nana and her care of Trouble over the last couple weeks (not to mention the first 10 months of his life!). I only get 5 sick days a year, and it’s only February - way too early to have burned up 4 of them. And I’m thankful for my dish-washing, Candyland playing Jelly Dad of a hubby who picks up the rest of the slack during these long winter weeks and almost never gets sick himself.