The good, the bad, and the etc.

It's been a while since I've blogged, and it's not because things aren't happening, but because it's hard to find the time.

Katherine is getting more and more active. Of course she's sleeping less during the day, which is to be expected, but for the past few weeks she has also made me regret all those times I've raved about her nighttime sleep habits without knocking on wood.

It's unpredictable; that's always been my undoing.

Predictability, as far as I'm concerned, is an asset that trumps all others. It can be something predictably awful, like burning your hand on the stove every single day at 1:29 p.m., or something predictably neutral, like dinner at 6:12 every night. As long as it can be counted upon to happen, I adapt. But little K's tendency to keep us guessing is taking some getting used to.

We took the kids to see Santa on Saturday, and Alex was shy but determined to tell him that we will be at Nana's house this year (so he won't miss us). Santa promised to be there. Alex grilled me afterward about whether or not that was the REAL Santa, and told me it's a good thing I'm not Santa, because I'd get really tired of landing on all those rooftops in one night. (My trademark laziness is lost on no one.)

I think he's already questioning the logistics.

Katherine went willingly to the old man (who looked especially old this year, bless him) and touched his beard and graced him with one of her big gummy smiles. The girl tasked with making easily distracted kids smile with her jingly reindeer puppet said, "She's, like, the best baby ever!" which, while obviously little more than teenage hyperbole, warms a mama's heart.

This was before Katherine spat up all over me and her beautiful green satin dress and the bench and the floor while we sat in the middle of the mall waiting for Alex and Steven to come out of Game Stop.

She knows how to charm a stranger, that one. She's a magnet for all those baby lovers, smiling and cooing and flirting her little heart out, so much so that I've had two creepy offers by old men to PURCHASE her and one slightly less creepy declaration by a sweet-looking elderly lady: "Just give me a chunk of her, that's all I need!"

It looks creepier in writing.

Things aren't quite all sunshine and gummy smiles and roses these days, but that's life. Which is what I told Alex tonight, when he despaired all kinds of out of proportion about the fact that Scooby-Doo Camp Scare had to go back to Red Box before he'd finished watching it. I don't know if he bought it any more than any of us do, when it comes down to those day-to-day disappointments that make up so much of life. But we learn to live with them without tears and melodrama, and he will, too. He's just (relatively) new.

Stress is, of late, like a hitchhiker I've picked up and can't shake out of my car, even after we've passed the exit he claimed he was looking for. I'm thinking of stopping at the nearest rest stop and booting him out and speeding away in a cloud of dust. I'm not the best analogy maker, but it's Sunday night and I'm tired.

Source of stress? I think it's Christmas. And not having the energy to do all the things I know I should do. It's being displeased with so many aspects of myself, and the ways in which I believe I'm falling short, and questioning even the things I think I'm doing right, like helping to raise smart, grateful, sensitive, empathetic kids who say (or will say) please and thank you without being reminded and hug me spontaneously and unselfconsciously.

It's, in a word, life. Good and bad and up and down and sometimes just there. But it's a package deal, and I do realize how blessed I am. How could I not be, with a husband who makes me giggle and snort like an intoxicated college girl, a little boy who tells me I can always call him my baby (as long as I don't tell Daddy), and a baby girl whose fast-evolving personality is in equal parts disarming, charming, and familiar? And, of course, dogs who curl up together on their new puffy bed like the remaining two puppies in an adoption-dwindling litter.

And friends who make me laugh and keep me sane. Eager and adept baby-holders, devoted Alex appreciators, bad-reality-show sharers, bravers of cold weather for the wonders of girltalk. I love them all.