Always a planner

I don't know what it is about me, but I can't help but plan ahead.  I suppose I'm just afraid to be caught unprepared.  No one could ever accuse me of acting spontaneously.  I guess in some ways that could be seen as a bad thing.  My mom used to frequently comment that I was like an old lady set in her ways.  It was a statement that I heard several times a week if not daily from the time I was 8 or 9 until after I had gotten married.  In many ways it's true.  I like my life to be predictable, and like the emperor in the Emperor's New Groove, I don't like anyone or anything to throw off my routine.  Only, I don't get to toss people off of buildings when things go wrong.

So back to planning.  I found myself up in my bedroom contemplating whether or not I should start wrapping the girls' Christmas presents and thereby lock myself into two specific wrapping papers.  After assessing what items I had in my rubbermaid tote of gifts, the one I keep around in case Christmas, Valentine's Day, Easter or either of the girl's birthdays should show up unannounced on any given day, I decided it would be better to just slap post-it notes with the name of the recipient on each of the gifts that were making the Christmas cut this year.   I did this to partially appease the part of me that has to have everything done yesterday.  I suspect I will be gift wrapping sometime after September 12th.

Something good came out of my craziness today.  I decided to write up a list of what I was giving each of the girls and I came up with an idea for what I will still need to buy.  I'm on year four of scaling back with Christmas gifts and this year I'm trying to take an approach I had seen mentioned on a message board a couple of years ago.  Where the kids will be allowed to ask for four things (possibly five) and these things will fall into the categories of "something you want, something you need, something to wear, something to read" and the possible fifth category may be something to watch.  We are blessed to have family who spoil my girls when it comes to gifts so cutting back on what we get them will help to keep us from being overwhelmed.  They got so much stuff last Christmas that we still have Christmas gifts in the family room that have no place where they belong.  It's a problem we're hoping to remedy in the coming month.

I'm going to try to enjoy my child free afternoon now.  My parents took the girls to a movie and I will have about two hours to myself.   I suppose I should spend some of that time picking out and ironing clothes for the viewing we need to attend tonight.  People are dropping like flies in our family these days.   In less than 90 days we have lost three family members.  This time we lost a cousin to Bryan's grandmother.  I liked how she always made me feel like I was part of the family.  She was a very nice woman and I'll miss not getting to see her when we pop in on our very extended cousins at their shore house (the youngest kids in that family are 8th or 9th cousins to my girls).