Today was one of those "Oh, so this is why you're supposed to do all your Christmas crap way ahead of time" days.
I have a short list to accomplish before I can tidy house, do a little more laundry, throw my clothes in a duffel:
Pack up gifts to send to Arizona
Drop them at the post office
Get the girls' hair cut
Now, my mom (the irrepressible Grammy) reads this, so I'm going to have to Mad Libs this a little.
First, I sit down to prepare the gifts for mailing. This is when I discover that the [noun] Molly painstakingly crafted to go with the [noun] is the wrong [expletive] size. How the [place] I [expletive] this up I will never know. So I quickly improvise: Instead of the [noun], I substitute [possessive noun] [thing] and enlist Molly's help in making it work. This means that Dug and I will have to make do with the [other thing], but whatever. And it means that Grammy gets two presents.
This also means we have to go to [expletive] Target again to get the right size [noun]. This changes our to do list thusly:
Get haircuts
Go to Target
Go to post office
So we get the haircuts and that goes well. May I recommend Cubby Cuts in Mountain View? Nice, family owned place and my kids like it. Usually it's quick but today they were busy, so that took longer than I hoped.
Then we go to Target and it starts raining. We choose a [noun] and navigate the crazy holiday cluster[expletive] that is my punishment, and I grab some cute tights for myself on clearance. And the whole thing takes like, four hours. Now it's past naptime.
So I know we're totally [expletive] for the post office. No way the girls will stay awake. For a wild moment I consider going there and just leaving them asleep in the car while I go in and mail the package but I don't even have a chance to seriously consider this because I see one of those little franchise mail stores.
It's dumping down rain when I pull in and when I try to put the [noun] together it gets a little sprinkled and I have to dry it off with Molly's spare underpants. I hope it isn't ruined, I was hurrying too fast to really notice.
I go in and start packing the gifts up and the girls start going nuts with the water cooler and NOT listening and NOT staying by me and NOT standing still and the nice lady who runs the place gave them a box of packing peanuts to play with. There was no line and the actual mailing of the gifts was quick and painless. Then we picked up all the bits of styrofoam and left.
Both girls fall asleep in the car and despite having JUST had a conversation with the haircut dude about Supersize Me, I still drive through Jack in the Box and get a couple of those wicked nasty tacos that I sometimes wake up in the middle of the night craving.