The Big DumpTruck

In some dusty corner way way back in the part of my brain where I store the lyrics to the commercial for Digger the Dog (“Digger the Dog, Digger he goes with you, when you explore”) I had a yellow sticky note to myself that said “Christmas Dinner”.

Now that my sister and I both have kids that are no longer babies, we don’t get together on Christmas Day. Part of me finds this incredibly sad, as I am such a freak for getting together with family. I know growing up we had to go to both Grandparents’ houses, one in the afternoon, one in the evening, but they basically lived in the same town. My sister lives about 20 minutes from here, so it’s a little more of a trek for her and the gang. Anyway, up until the year before last, we still went to my parents’ for Christmas breakfast because Christmas Eve was spent at my Aunt’s House. Kids, of course, turn that all upside down, and we started doing Christmas Eve at Mom’s, and then I invite Mom and Dad to have Christmas dinner with us because we live in the same town. Last year we had that massive snowstorm on Christmas day, so we didn’t get together for lunch. I actually spent most of the day handling snow removal, if I recall correctly.

This year I sort of forgot that we don’t go to Mom and Dad’s on Christmas day, and that if I didn’t want to have a can of soup for Christmas dinner, I actually have to plan something, buy the ingredients, and make it. D’oh! So yes, stupid me will be going to the grocery store tonight or tomorrow (or sending Mr. Dump) to get some kind of roast (pork? beef?), potatoes, carrots, etc., and all the ingredients for green bean casserole (Ya, baby!). I called mom today and invited them over (cause, like, why would they assume they were invited if I didn’t actually invite them?) Whether they come over or not, I mean, we have to have something that day. I feel so silly for not even thinking about it. I’ll also extend the invitation to my sister’s family, because that’s the polite thing to do, which would be cool because I think the best thing about the holidays is having a house full of people. Some people may like the “oh, we’re just going to be our little family” but not me. It’s this time of year that I wish I had more kids, because that would take care of the problem.

Anyway, I’m rambling. Happy 2 days until Christmas!

I have chapped lips to beat the band. They weren’t this bad yesterday, but man, it’s like the skin was replaced with a shingle off my roof. I happened to find some Aquaphor in my backpack (do you call them that? Backpack. I wanted to write napsack but then I wasn’t sure if it was spelled knapsack and that looked silly, and then I realized the whole word is silly. So backpack it is.)

What was I saying? Oh, between the clear Almay Pure Tints (if it’s clear, how can it be a tint? Hmmm?) and the Aquaphor, maybe, just maybe, they’ll get back into skin form sometime before the end of the week. I’ll keep you posted.

1. Nobody in my family likes green bean casserole, so I haven’t had it in years. I’m going to make some for me, and eat it while I search for clues that I’m adopted.

2. I can’t remember what 2 was supposed to be.

3. We made reindeer food today, so what more could possibly be left to prepare?

4. I talked Junior into watching 2 different versions of a Christmas Carol with me. This has helped me start to break his current greedy/selfish state that he’d best grow out of *very* quickly.

5. I just can’t fall asleep if my feet are cold. I’d like to thank the person who invented socks.

We have Mr. Rogers on here. Here is a quick summary of the neighborhood of makebelieve segment:

Mr. McPheely delivers a box of fortune cookies to King Friday but King Friday wasn’t impressed and told Mr. McPheely he could just leave them for others. Well, the assistant mayor opened one and it was the special silver fortune cookie and out popped a fortune cookie man who only spoke spanish.

Yes, I know.

Do you remember Calvin and Hobbes games where they would just make up rules as they played, and they both seemed like they totally understood?

Junior is doing that to us right now in the car (why yes, I’m writing this from the car!) We’ve been assigned numbers, and we have to remember our numbers because if he calls our number we have to handle the mission. But the numbers we get can be changed if someone is unavailable. Or something. Junior just said “I just got one of the levers and I got 14 points…we’re going to get 1000 points because I have speed shoes. If we get there in 50 minutes, we get another thousand points. If we get there in 60 we get a kazillion.”

I couldn’t make this up.