I thought that when I finished with NaBloPoMo, I’d take it easy with the blogging, but I didn’t mean to go totally AWOL. I’ve just been crazy busy with the PTA stuff. I’m running an art program for the school and the learning curve is way steep, plus I’m spending hours and hours photographing and documenting all the art prints that the school owns. It’s a lot of work but actually, it’s kind of nice to have a real project on the go with real deliverables and real deadlines. I’d kind of forgotten how to do work, if you know what I mean, and this is a nice refresher. Not that I’m anxious to like, have a job or anything, but as a sideline, the PTA is a nice diversion.

On the home front we’re busy with our advent activities and it’s going fairly well. Tuesday we put up the tree and the kids had a good time and actually did a pretty good job of not grouping all the decorations on three bottom branches. Plus, so far we’ve only caught Little Miss Sunshine removing ornaments one time, so that’s a pretty good track record. Wednesday we made paper snowflakes to decorate our windows, which was okay. It turned out the cutting of the snowflakes was too tough for my 5 and 4 year old, even using tissue paper, so I wound up cutting out most of the snowflakes and the kids just got to tape them to the windows. I also had some jelly-type window stickers of snowmen I’d bought at the last minute to add to the window decorations, so they put those up too, which pretty much saved the activity.

Yesterday we watched The Sound Of Music, with popcorn and chips. Did you know that movie is FOUR HOURS LONG? I do. Four hours of running commentary — “Now Maria is feeling sad because she thinks the Daddy doesn’t love her. Now the kids are feeling sad because the Baroness doesn’t know how to play ball. That one is Kurt. That one is Liesel. That one is Gretel. That one is Maria. NOW EAT YOUR CHIPS.” — is very tiring. I intended to just watch the songs and also to skip the Nazi bit at the end but the older two kids were surprisingly engrossed, and got really mad when I tried to skip any parts. After the wedding part, I tried to shut off the video and they insisted it could not be the end because they hadn’t seen any credits (my own need to always watch the credits comes back to bite me in the ass!), so I would up giving a mini-lecture on WWII and then talking them through the finale. All this time, Little Miss Sunshine was bored out of her skull and she’s also teething so she basically sat next to me on the couch and provided an ongoing background soundtrack of whining for four hours. FOUR HOURS. Actually, by the end of it, it kind of felt like FOUR DAYS.

Still, now the kids are going around the house singing “So Long, Farewell” and that makes me very happy. Still, next year? SHORTER MOVIE.

Today is a PD day so we’ve already made our rice krispie treats (our planned playdate with the Carl Sagans fell through as the Saganette is very sick with the flu). Now I only have eight hours left to fill! Where was that Sound of Music DVD, again?