The Hours

Eeeee. As in "Eke!" There was an error made in which someone decided to start tracking the number of hours going into purely holiday related activities vs. normal activities.

In the past 16 hours:
1.5 hours baking brownies & blondies for church bake sale
4.5 hours wrapping gifts
2 hours shopping, including driving
.5 hours pouring over holiday budget
4 hours half watching "ELF" twice on t.v. while doing other things
.25 hours considering preparing child's outfit for band concert
.5 hours returning child's outfit because it is ill-fitting for band concert tonight
.75 hours replacing ill-fitting band concert outfit

Hello. Is it just me or does this somehow account for 14 hours?! And there was comparatively little accomplished. Except that someone was (Drum roll, please.) multitasking. Even the down-time for Mama is squeezed in while "accomplishing something". It's an imperfect system, but at least down-time has been worked into the craziness before Mama has a teensy stroke. Oh, yeah.

2 hours of the gift-wrapping was spent at a friend's house talking and letting three-year-olds apply the tape to the packages because it was way more fun to tote the gifts and assorted wrapping stuff over there (and have a girly visit including much-needed coffee) than to do the task at home. A trip to pick up gift cards for grandparents to give the kids was tucked into the time slot spent waiting for Katie to finish at the orthodontist. Holiday budget, grandparent shopping accounting, and checking account tracking were all lumped together with a headache. Additional wrapping supplies were picked up while grocery shopping after the discovery that the boxes were not really much more expensive. The brownies and blondies baked while kids were getting ready for school. Laundry has run throughout all of the above, and a hot bath fit in around 1:00 a.m. with a new personal high score on my favorite time-sucking on-line game.

Whoo-Hoo! There may be hope yet for a Merry Christmas.