Christmas Crazy Reminders are Here to Remind You

Christmas Crazy!

It has been at least three minutes since I last mentioned it, so let me just do that. CHRISTMAS CRAZY. It's that thing where we all work together to create a little (lot) of magic for children who are receiving services from Center for Victims. What kind of services, you ask? Center for Victims does a ton of things, including advocacy, transitional and emergency shelter, counseling services, educational programs ... the list goes on and on.

The important thing is that Center for Victims is there for children who have seen or felt violence. They're the ones who help kids pick up the pieces and move on. While they provide services to people of all ages, over 30% of their clients are 18 or younger. Over half of those kids are 11 or younger.

11 or younger. That's too young to have stared violence in the eyes. Way too young. And yet.

So! If you've got $5 to spare, that's a great start to helping throw a little positivity into the world. If you've got more than $5, that's great too! Every little bit helps and it genuinely all comes together in a way that makes a huge difference.

You can help by grabbing something from the Amazon Wishlist. Here's the link. You can also help by throwing a few dollars into the pot. I'll be out turning that money into magic in the next two weeks. That's how I make sure we haven't left any kids underserved, regardless of age or preferences. Just click the reindeer and I'll match things up.

Thanks for all you do to make this thing work. It's truly my most favorite internet thing of all time, and I'm considering cat memes when I say that. Christmas Crazy is even better than cat memes.

By the way, we're currently at $3728. WOOOOO! But also, we have work to do. Let's go!

Paybacks, Baby

Mila has always been my good sleeper.*

* "Good" is a very relative term. It simply means she is capable of sleeping through the night without harassing me 224681938 times. It does NOT imply that she sleeps in her own bed. Ever.

Every time I mention that Mila is a good sleeper, I have to qualify the statement. She's not terrible, which makes her awesome, but really it's all about the comparison to her sister. Alexis has always been and will always be THE WORST SLEEPER EVER. The kid is in 8th grade and still wakes me up in the middle of the night once per week or so because she thinks of something and HAS to tell me at that exact moment.

Never once has she told me something that I needed to know in the middle of the night, by the way. For example, earlier this week she woke me up to tell me that the cat knocked down her Christmas tree (again ... SOB). AS IF I DIDN'T HEAR THE GIANT CRASH. I knew what it was; I didn't need confirmation at 2:30 am.

ANYWAY.

Mila is nowhere near as bad as her sister. Mostly she goes to bed easily and she stays asleep. Probably 10% of the time I end up going to get her a glass of water or telling her to go potty or something similar in the middle of the night, but it's fine. It's totally fine.

LAST NIGHT WAS NOT FINE. AT ALL.

Mila has a cold. It's a minor cold, really. There's a little bit of a cough and that's about it. But HOOBOY did she drag me down to a level of misery I didn't know she herself could reach. The poor kid coughed every 5 minutes ALL. NIGHT. LONG. All night. She never managed to sleep more than 4 minutes at a time because she couldn't stop coughing. She was pleasant through it all. Just coughing. Nonstop.

I spent the day in a zombie state because OBVIOUSLY and I think that's why I didn't catch what Mila said to me after school until much later. Mila spent a solid ten minutes in the car informing me that I'm a bad parent because she was coughing at school and didn't have cough drops. "Everybody else has a bag of cough drops in the teacher's desk," was her general explanation for why I'm the worst.

"Everybody else" is Mila-speak for "one other person," by the way. Generally it's her way of saying that somebody has something she wants. Therefore, I dug in. "Who has a bag of cough drops?" I asked. I fully expected one or two names to be recited.

She recited more than 20 names. I stopped counting at 20 because ZOMG SHE LISTED HER ENTIRE CLASS.

She may have been hoodwinking me and naming everybody just for funsies, or she might have been reporting that literally her entire class is coughing. Like I said, I didn't register the meaning of the conversation initially, but I did eventually catch up. When I did, I emailed her teacher.

Her entire class is coughing. Literally. Her ENTIRE class.

I'm not sure which kid was Patient Zero, but I HAVE FEEEEEELINGS ABOUT THIS. I completely didn't get sleep for an entire night because of that kid and I think maybe I need to enforce some sort of paybacks for that nonsense.

So Much Chaos

I have a question. How exactly is it possible that Thanksgiving has already come and gone when it was just January yesterday? I know I always say that Mila is bad at time, but apparently that's a contagious condition because I don't know where this year went. It just *poof*. We have not had 11 months in 2019. I don't believe it.

But now that somehow it's freakin' December, there is a whole lot of Christmas-ing to do. Alas, I took the girls to Phipps for the holiday lights.

That was a very good choice.

Mila in public places like Phipps is an interesting experiment in insanity. That girl has more enthusiasm than can be contained, so she's not contained. She runs around like a wild animal, very literally climbing walls and teetering on the verge of destruction. Somehow she never actually breaks anything, but I think it's luck. She certainly gives it her best attempts.

Even as the kid is the most exhausting 32 pounds of vibrating chaos that has ever existed, she's also the most enthusiastic 32 pounds of vibrating chaos that ever existed. Mila is amazed by EVERYTHING and she always lets you know. Every single room that we walked into at Phipps was "So BEAUTIFUL!" and "THIS IS MY FAVORITE!" She loved the lights, the flowers ... everything.

She especially loved the trains.

It wasn't surprising at all that Mila wanted to spend hours running in a circle pushing every button so that every train would move, but it was surprising that she got that exact opportunity. Now that we've already done it, let me just admit to you that the best time to Phipps is late on a Sunday night. The place was empty.

Seriously.

The only problem with Mila's every train dream coming true is that now she wants to go back every single day and do it again and again and again. It's not going to be that empty every single day, so I'm not sure how that's going to work out for her. Besides, I need to sleep for about a month to make up for all the energy I lost trying to keep up with her ... and maybe that explains why 2019 seems to have disappeared into thin air. It's passed me by as I tried to keep up with Mila.