How is it that Christmas seems to sneak up on us every year? I don't mean that generally, I mean, us, the Hipps family, and me most of all. It's like I'm the only person on the planet who didn't have twelve months to come up with a plan.
In fairness to myself (or, more likely, as a way of making excuses), it seems to me that we did have a lot going on. To start, the cruise which I mentioned in the previous post came with a great deal of stress and mental effort in the form of getting Angie a passport. For this, she would need her birth certificate, which we found easily in the filing cabinet where my highly-organized wife keeps all of our important papers, and which was promptly mislaid and feared to have been accidentally thrown away. I mean, this puppy was missing for weeks. Angie was born in Hawaii, so we had to apply to Hawaii for a new copy and pray that a recent copy of a Hawaiian birth certificate would mean more to the folks in the passport office than it does to some people. A day or two before the replacement arrived, we did finally manage to find the birth certificate in a place it totally shouldn't have been, and Angie was able to make her rescheduled passport appointment. Hooray!
Our next pre-holiday hurdle was... the dishwasher. I was going to go into a lengthy explanation of this debacle, but in the interest of time, suffice to say that our dishwasher went to that great appliance service center in the sky. Actually, it died on us and went to rest against the side of our house where it currently resides while we wait for the yard gnomes to drag it to their underground lair or something; I've forgotten why I haven't taken it to the city dump already. Anyway, it shuffled off its heating coil and we had to buy a replacement. I realize you may say that we didn't have to buy a replacement, in that it's a modern convenience and we could just wash the dishes by hand. We tried this for over a week, but with the number of dishes we generate, we were spending all of our free time at the sink, to the point where the kids were having to come in there to say their prayers at night and, in the daytime, asking if they were really careful, could they please just drive the van themselves to a park or someplace just to get out of the house. So a replacement became a mental health requirement, and one was found and purchased at BrandsMart.
We followed this up with Thanksgiving, for which Angie and the kids went to Columbus for the week and I arrived Thanksgiving Eve. The purpose here was to give Joshua a good long time to hang out with his Grandmama, since she'd be coming less than two weeks later to stay with us while Angie went cruising. The week after that we prepped for the cruise with meal-planning and whatnot, and the week after that was the cruise, which I believe I've covered enough. After a day or so for Angie to readjust to family life, we were finally able to buy our first Christmas presents on Thursday, December 17th. Today is Wednesday, December 23rd, two days before the blessed event, and I believe we're almost done with our shopping. Well, Angie's done, and I'm nearly done. Fortunately for me, there's hardly anybody out shopping this late in the season, so I should be able to wrap things up today. Actually, I probably won't have time to wrap until tomorrow. Or Saturday.
In fairness to myself (or, more likely, as a way of making excuses), it seems to me that we did have a lot going on. To start, the cruise which I mentioned in the previous post came with a great deal of stress and mental effort in the form of getting Angie a passport. For this, she would need her birth certificate, which we found easily in the filing cabinet where my highly-organized wife keeps all of our important papers, and which was promptly mislaid and feared to have been accidentally thrown away. I mean, this puppy was missing for weeks. Angie was born in Hawaii, so we had to apply to Hawaii for a new copy and pray that a recent copy of a Hawaiian birth certificate would mean more to the folks in the passport office than it does to some people. A day or two before the replacement arrived, we did finally manage to find the birth certificate in a place it totally shouldn't have been, and Angie was able to make her rescheduled passport appointment. Hooray!
Our next pre-holiday hurdle was... the dishwasher. I was going to go into a lengthy explanation of this debacle, but in the interest of time, suffice to say that our dishwasher went to that great appliance service center in the sky. Actually, it died on us and went to rest against the side of our house where it currently resides while we wait for the yard gnomes to drag it to their underground lair or something; I've forgotten why I haven't taken it to the city dump already. Anyway, it shuffled off its heating coil and we had to buy a replacement. I realize you may say that we didn't have to buy a replacement, in that it's a modern convenience and we could just wash the dishes by hand. We tried this for over a week, but with the number of dishes we generate, we were spending all of our free time at the sink, to the point where the kids were having to come in there to say their prayers at night and, in the daytime, asking if they were really careful, could they please just drive the van themselves to a park or someplace just to get out of the house. So a replacement became a mental health requirement, and one was found and purchased at BrandsMart.
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We followed this up with Thanksgiving, for which Angie and the kids went to Columbus for the week and I arrived Thanksgiving Eve. The purpose here was to give Joshua a good long time to hang out with his Grandmama, since she'd be coming less than two weeks later to stay with us while Angie went cruising. The week after that we prepped for the cruise with meal-planning and whatnot, and the week after that was the cruise, which I believe I've covered enough. After a day or so for Angie to readjust to family life, we were finally able to buy our first Christmas presents on Thursday, December 17th. Today is Wednesday, December 23rd, two days before the blessed event, and I believe we're almost done with our shopping. Well, Angie's done, and I'm nearly done. Fortunately for me, there's hardly anybody out shopping this late in the season, so I should be able to wrap things up today. Actually, I probably won't have time to wrap until tomorrow. Or Saturday.
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