Welcome To The World

Today is my last full day of work until Thursday – tomorrow I work a half day and that's when my big family Christmas celebration is, Wednesday is Christmas Day – while the kids are off school until the second of January next year, a week from Thursday. And it's already showing … in all fairness, expecting Sarah and Jeffrey to sit pristine and still in the morning after sleeping in (for them, they had an extra hour fifteen minutes from their usual school time) and staying late to help us wrap presents and make Santa hats (single Bugle snacks, melted white almond bark around the widest edge, and single M&Ms) and having to keep them mostly inside because not only is it snowy where we are it is also chilly was somewhat futile.

Okay, now I'm sounding like the Borg … and on that note, I'll go into the latest Star Trek novel I read, James Swallow's The Poisoned Chalice (ISBN 9781476722221), the fourth book in a series called “The Fall”, and just when I think I have a grasp on what THAT means I get thrown a curve ball. By the start of this book, the USS Titan under William Riker's command is summoned back to Earth and he's promoted to admiral while his first officer commands a medical frigate and his chief of security (Tuvok from Star Trek: Voyager) gets assigned to a black ops unit by the Federation government, and many in Starfleet are starting to have questions about the people at the top, who right now are only there because the previous president was assassinated under spurious circumstances …

For breakfast, Sarah and Jeffrey had Menards' version of fruity pebbles AND PUT SUGAR ON IT! And you thought a spoonful of sugar helped the medicine go down; fortunately, by the time Sharon Martha's mom came by the house to pick us up – yes, she had to pick us up at our house because my car wouldn't start because it is twenty-two below and I could not plug it in! – they were really to fall asleep in the back seat. Now I pray they are a mite more sedate by the time I meet them tonight and have them for a few hours before Martha gets home for the night. Oh, I can do this, I can handle having the kids help me clean the house for the family Christmas party tomorrow … which we found out yesterday we would host (though Martha's sister Lesa and Sharon are doing the cooking).

Besides, I can feed the kids to The Thing Beneath their Beds, unless they're hungry … Patrick Rothfuss wrote and Nate Taylor illustrated The Adventures of the Princess and Mr. Whiffle: The Thing Beneath the Bed (ISBN 9781596063136) where a little girl and her teddy bear sleep with eyes – the girl's, not the teddy bear's – half open at the prospect of something that reaches out from underneath the bed. I have not been able to read this again after finishing it the first time. Not that the story was bad, but I guess I don't have “a dark sense of humor [or] an appreciation of old-school faerie tales” as the jacket cover states … you're given two chances to stop before you reach the ending, the one with the teeth in it. That's as much as I will say about that.

And what about the rest of this weekend? The kids love the United States puzzle that Dalyce who helps me out with Sunday school (and THAT starts back up the first Sunday on January at church) gave them yesterday, and they sang marvelously with Carol Choir that morning – and Jeffrey, the little sneak, tried to get communion bread! – before we had visitors, one of Martha's coworkers Pam and her husband Shaun out to visit our house and were not ashamed it wasn't neat, saw a live nativity scene at a local church, and yesterday it was eighty-five degrees in Florida! But I'm nice about it … yes, I can do this.

David