Enjoying Christmas

I have always wished for a slower-paced more relaxed Christmas season so that I would have time to enjoy it with my family. I’d like to have more Christmastime traditions too. But as a musician, this will just never be the case unless I take the entire season off, which we simply can’t afford! I have had rehearsals and/or concerts nearly every day so far and add on top of that the fact that I also have my own Christmas shopping and preparations to make and you have stress. But miraculously, I’ve gotten a lot done and have kept up pretty good spirits. I’m reserving the few days before Christmas JUST for my family. I have no other gigs except for one on Christmas Eve (which I think will be very enjoyable and not stressful).

We have a few ideas of fun family Christmastime type things to do and I’m getting very excited about that time to just relax and enjoy the season.

One of the concerts I’ve been the most excited about is tomorrow night and I am getting nervous! Hopefully I’ll feel better about it after tonight’s rehearsal. My trio will be featured and I’ll also be playing my electric violin on a few of the selections. My parents are coming in to see the concert since my dad gave me my electric violin a year ago and I’ve yet to perform on it! I wanted Dad to get to hear it. I’m pretty stoked about that!

Tomorrow is a big day for another reason also. Will is turning TWO! Every time the girls ask what we are doing for Will’s birthday, I say “We are having a concert for Will’s birthday!” (That’s about as far as I have gotten…) What a lucky two-year-old! haha

In other news, I’ve been working on some organization in our house. I’ve been displeased with our linen storage system (or lack thereof) since there are no linen closets in this house and the measly little cabinet we bought for the purpose was overstuffed and NOT working well. Since we can’t afford to buy a nicer/bigger piece of furniture for the purpose we found other solutions. I got three under-bed storage bins. One for each of the three bedrooms upstairs. In each one goes the sheets/blankets for the room it is in. So in the girls’ room under one of their beds in the bin are all the extra sheets/blankets for the girls’ beds. Same for the boys’ room. And for our room. We also installed some hooks and shelving in the girls bathroom for their towels. Now our little linen cabinet only has to house our regular towels and it’s just big enough for that! I feel much better now that I know where all the linens are and they are stored neatly and safely out of sight.

I also tackled some laundry issues. Our laundry is constantly getting backed up because of what a jumbled mess comes out and no one wants to attempt to fold/put anything away. It gets really overwhelming. For me part of the problem was that once the laundry is folded there are about a million different places to take the stacks of clothes in order to put them away. So even if it got folded, still no one wanted to put it all away! So now I have 3 new labeled laundry baskets. (Sound familiar?) Yup, you guessed it. One for each upstairs bedroom. (Though they are kept in our room so far.) When the laundry is clean I sort it before folding into the laundry baskets. Girls’ laundry, Boys’ laundry, and our laundry. I take each basket to its assigned room and then fold it all and put it away in that room. It definitely saves my sanity since it’s all in the right room before even being folded! Makes it a bit less overwhelming and it feels simpler.

The boys laundry in particular can be quite perplexing as their sizes are somewhat similar and some of their clothes can be really confusing. So I even went so far as to label all the boys’ drawers with what goes inside. I can usually remember these things but even I was having some trouble with it. And it was completely blowing Steven’s mind. haha! We will both greatly benefit from the added labels.

And speaking of laundry, Steven found a pair of Claire’s bloomers in his sock drawer recently. I did NOT do that!

As far as Christmas readiness goes, I’m feeling much better this year than last. Most of my biggest projects are done and I only have a few more odds and ends to get together and then… wrapping! I hope to be done with it all before next week!

I hope everyone is having a blessed Christmas season and taking time to remember and ponder the true meaning of our celebration!