Almost Excited!

Only 2 days until Christmas and it's all good here. NO wrapping done, but not my department. I take that back...I did wrap AND deliver all 20-something teachers, assistants, bus drivers, therapists, sitters, etc...gifts this past week. I hate to wrap...where as my DH is what I call a "gift wrap nazi" - it's his thing....he's military like about it....meticulous, neat, has better visual perception than me, he even enjoys it...it's not really something I should do.

I just got off the treadmill....and I feel great, though I must get in the shower soon so we can go to Church. I cannot believe sometimes that exercise has become a part of my life. I can't say I hate it as much as I used to, because truth be told, once I feel that first bead of sweat, I know I am doing my body good. Granted, crawling our of my bed at 6:15 to put on my exercise clothes and sneaker, get water, a towel, my iPod, etc...seems like a task not worth undertaking in the cold dark that is my house, but it's the only time of day I can be alone and think and do something good for myself at the same time. An then now, 45 minutes later, I feel like it was all worth it.

Fish has been ordered....all those different kinds...shrimp, clams, mussels, flounder, salmon, calamari, crab legs, lobster tails....it's all ordered. I have all my Food Network recipes ready...for calamari salad, the lime sauce for the salmon, oriental style flounder fillets (soy sauce and sesame seeds), stuffed shrimp (using Ritz crackers which I don't think I've ever had one in my life), even the antipasto salad I recipied from the Food Network.

I decided to not cook 2 days in a row, and ordered Christmas dinner "half-cooked"from Wegman's ( gourmet type grocery store) which had a rib roast and 5 side dishes for 8-10 people for less than what I paid for the roast ALONE in the past. My mom got her turkey that way for Thanksgiving (from her Wegman's ) and it was incredible...everything - turkey and all the sides was so tasty. Half-cooked means that it's partially cooked....so your cooking time in the oven is 1 hour instead of 2....amazing, and it's all juicy and not dry!

Christmas started yesterday for the boys. We let them open their gifts from Aunt Rosa & Uncle Frank and Cousins Jesse, Madison and Christian in Vermont. It all could end now, and Matty would be happy...Aunt Rosa found him every possible HSM2 book, activity, game, the DVD, that was appropriate for boys. It's all he wanted, the "extended edition DVD, out Dec. 11" he kept reminding me. Ben scored too...with creative Diego books that I had never seen..with a reader pen that reads the story to you, with marionette puppets attached to the book that you can velcro to the pages as you're reading the story...Dora color forms...again, if it ended now, they'd be happy.

We have to stagger the gift opening like that...otherwise we're looking at a meltdown from each of them on Christmas Day. It's too much in every sense for them. They become so overstimulated that they don't even see what they are doing after a while.

Today we'll open Aunt Teresa, Uncle Eddies and Cousins Blaise, Mia and Lukas' gifts...again, since we coached each other as to what to get for each other's children, it could all end today for Matty and Ben. In fact it should...Santa, no need to stop here, we're good! Our kids want for nothing!

I hear the patter of feet upstairs in my kitchen....time to make some coffee and and get ready for another day!