I know, I know

I haven't posted in a week or something. I have plenty on my mind, but nothing interesting to say.

Yesterday morning began with all the fire alarms in our house screaming at 6:46 a.m. Actually it wasn't all of them. We live in an old house in a "transitional" neighborhood. That means we needed to buy an alarm system. So we have a number (means I don't know what the number is) of smoke detectors in our house that are hard wired to the alarm system. If those are activated, they will call the fire department automatically. Those were not going off.

We also have several (I think 13 or so) that are just your basic, ordinary, run-of-the-mill smoke alarms, except that they are linked somehow. If any of the thirteen smells smoke (or breaks or malfunctions or has a dead battery or a piece of fuzz in it), they will all go off. This is a great idea, in a house as big as ours, if there were actually a fire.

There wasn't. But these are the ones going off. Lots of them. Screaming. Did I mention it was 6:46 A. M. in the morning? It was not time for the entire clan to be awake. And yet.

There. We. Were.

All. Of. Us.

It really wasn't a bad day, considering how it started.

The hard thing about this week is that it really isn't anything special. We returned from our Thanksgiving journey to the Grandmas' houses. We are trying to get through the laundry disaster that we inflicted on ourselves. But that's not our real problem.

Our real problem is that we are in The Holiday Mood. We feel like celebrating. We have eaten several turkeys and pies worth of food. We shirked responsibility for a full week, really. And it felt great. Now we know Christmas is coming. The goose is getting fat. There are presents being purchased, secrets being kept. We haven't decorated yet (and I'm not sure we should, considering the toddlers - today we've cleaned up 2 dog food messes, a pile of rice, and several decks of scattered cards), but others have, and we can see the lights and garland everywhere we go.

The last thing we feel like doing (and I mean me, mostly) is buckling down, putting on our big girl panties, and getting crap done. Today is Wednesday, and we've almost made it to another weekend, which will further disrupt our already fragile ecosystem of labor and reward.

I don't know if I, personally, have the will power to pull us out of the holiday tail spin. And Thanksgiving was early this year. IT'S NOT EVEN DECEMBER YET!

So. Here's hoping I pull my head out of my butt and get my proverbial act together sometime soon, or we will definitely be doing school all the way to August.

Um, Merry Christmas, everybody.