The vacation before vacation.

It's 4:20 am. What the hell am I doing on the computer? I don't normally get on so early, but I woke up at 3:30 am because I went to bed at 8:00 pm, and my body obviously thinks it's had enough sleep. I woke up and then couldn't go back to sleep because I started thinking about the stuff I have to do today: wrap my mom's birthday present, write a letter to the mailman telling him when to stop our mail, get the Christmas package for my sister's family together. You know how it goes. Anyway, we're taking our daughter up to Chicago today because my mom is flying in to take her back to DC. That's where we'll be this Christmas, but my daughter's school ended yesterday and my husband and I don't start our vacation for another week, so my mom's going to get the kid a week early. Good for us because it means life will be a little less hectic as we finish up this last week of work before the holidays. I'm also grateful for my mother getting the child because it will save me a week's worth of child care money. Woo hoo. I can, of course, then spend money saved on presents, which is good for the kid. She's starting to want high-ticket items now and it definitley changes the way you look at shopping. She wants things like video games, dragon playsets and whatnot, so the number of items under the tree will probably be less. That's not a bad thing as far as I'm concerned.

When I was a kid, I remember my parents would tell us we could ask Santa for two things and that was it. So the one year I asked for a bionic woman doll, her inflatible dome house and her control panel, and that was ONE gift and for the second I wanted some board game. I don't remember the name but it was the one with a little dome in the middle with a die in it and you had to push down on the dome to get your dice roll. I mainly wanted it because you had to push that thing down and that seemed really cool to me in the commercials. Anyway, my parents gave it all to me, which is cool because they could have definitely said the bionic woman doll was just one thing. I remember the Christmas in third grade was kind of a bummer because my dad was stationed in Germanyy and we were still in Georgia waiting until we could go over, too, and we each only got one gift that year. It didn't seem like Christmas anyway without my father there. I don't know if the reason we only could get one gift was because we didn't have as much money as usual with my dad out of the country, but it was a sparse year all the way around, that's for sure. Not that it bothers me now or anything, but I remember being disappointed then. But that's life. The next year was a more normal Christmas because we were in Germany with our dad by then.