Have Yourself an Imperfect Little Christmas...

I'm in a bit of a funk today.  It's only December 4th, and I feel like I've hit the pre-Christmas freak out already.  Not a good sign.  (As my family can vouch, the pre-Christmas freak out does not usually arrive until December 20th.) Too much to do, too little time, not enough money, too much stuff to buy. Ugh.  Stuff.  Gotta buy the stuff, wrap the stuff, hide the stuff, pack the stuff in the van and drive it 6 hours to the relatives' houses.  I'm feeling a bit bah-humbug about it all.

And to be honest, I'm feeling a bit bah-humbug about all the Christmas traditions that usually make me so happy.  We spent the past 2 nights decorating the house for Christmas, and it seems like each night it's ended up being the same peppermint-covered stressball we have to choke down with a glass of crappy eggnog: Kids spazz because they're SOOOOOO EXCITED and I stress because there's a lot of fragile stuff in the Christmas decoration boxes and I don't need another mess and puh-leeze don't get that out yet.  And then someone ends up getting on someone else's nerves and fighting breaks out, the baby Jesus goes flying though the air and the Phineas & Ferb ornament gets broken, and then I flip out and we all end up crying.

Merry Christmas.

I'm sure that anybody walking past our house and looking upon this scene through our large living room windows is less likely to think "Norman Rockwell holiday scene" are more likely to think "On the next episode of 'Cops'...").  And so I end up feeling guilty about tingeing the kids' holiday memories with freak-outs.  I should be the epitome of motherly calm, right?  I mean, it's the holidays.  And they're only young once.  I shouldn't be robbing them of this magic.

And then the cat decides to climb the tree and knock some of the ornaments off.  And I wonder if I should just take the tree down and forget about it for this year.  I look at one of my nativity sets.  Mary is always so calm and so serene.  I envy her.  Here she is, just having given birth among the cows and donkeys and lambs, entertaining magi and shepherd boys and angels, living in a barn for gosh-sakes, and she's just smiling.  She's so full of joy and peace.  But it's her serenity that I envy.  It's just absent from my life right now.

In place of serenity, I have stress.  I have the normal stress of daily living and meeting commitments, and then I have the holiday stress.  I have the "my teen doesn't want anything for Christmas that costs less than $200" stress.  I have the "my middle child hardly wants anything for Christmas, which you think would be great, but then how do you make Christmas morning fair?" stress.  I have the "my youngest child wants expensive and inexpensive gifts for Christmas and understands that Mommy and Daddy can't afford expensive gifts, but doesn't understand why Santa can't and so I need to work carefully at couching her expectations" stress.  And I haven't even begun to deal with extended family stress, or baking stress, or traveling stress. Oh gosh, I just remembered the "I gotta clean the van so we can pack the van so we can travel" stress.  I'm not even ready to deal with that stress yet.

So I sit here in my pajamas with my coffee cup and the couch and I try to avoid the stress, but I know it's out there and it won't get better with time.  I think about selling some plasma so that we have a bit more cash to spread around.  I look at the Nativity again and try to focus, focus, focus on the reason for the season.  

And then I unload my holiday funk onto my blog and unleash it all on the internet because I know that there are so many other moms out there feeling similarly (dads seem to be largely immune from the bulk of holiday stress for some reason, at least in my circle of friends).  I have mom friends who are doing this all as single parents.  Friends who are grappling with grief and the holidays.  Friends who are struggling with illness, or job loss, or money problems.  And I want to say to the people trying to get through the holidays with a big mountain of stress on their backs that you are not alone.  We're all just muddling through.  We look at the picture perfect Christmas cards our friends send and feel inferior because our kids couldn't smile and get along for the time it took to take one picture.  We see Facebook posts of sparkling trees that look like Martha Stewart flew in and decorated it personally while our trees are listing slightly and covered with clothespin reindeer and glittered-macaroni snowflakes.  We hear about the super-expensive or extravagant gifts someone is buying their child or spouse and feel guilty that we can't make our loved ones' Christmas dreams come entirely true.  We see pictures of happy family gatherings, and miss the people who aren't gathered at our table.

 It should come as no surprise that "Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas" is one of my favorite Christmas songs, precisely because it's not about perfect Christmases, but about hoping to have family near and hoping that all the small problems of life fly away, while at the same time yearning for the golden Christmases of our past.  But if you think about it, were those Christmases perfect?  Or have we just gilded them with fondness and nostalgia so that they seem to be?  Do we forget the freak-outs eventually and just remember the family and the fun? I don't recall my mom ever stressing over holidays, and yet she must have, being a single parent and working full time as a nurse and always having to work on either Christmas Eve or Christmas Day, if not both.

So maybe for today I'll set aside the guilt.  I'm not a perfect mom on a Tuesday afternoon in mid-April, nor on a busy Thursday morning in early-October, so why should I expect myself to be a better version of myself simply because it's the holidays?  Santa stopped watching me years ago. And I'm going to try my hardest to let go of some of the expectations.  Maybe someone on my list doesn't need a perfect gift.  Maybe it's okay if they just know that I was thinking of them. (I just saw a commercial for a Chia Uncle Si.  Anyone interested?  Nothing says "I've given up on shopping for you" quite like a Chia Pet, but a Chia Uncle Si?  That's like saying "I remembered that you like Duck Dynasty while I was buying milk at CVS.")  Maybe the wrapping paper doesn't have to be perfect.  Maybe I won't adjust where the kids hung the ornaments and if the cat knocks the low-hanging ornaments off, I'll just hang them back up again and go about my day.  (Although if the cat knocks the tree down one more time, all bets are off and it is full-on Mommy vs. Cat War.  Seriously.)  I'll try to be more a bit more like Mary and try to capture more of her serenity.  And I'll try so very hard to keep my focus on her son.  Once I fish his manger out of the depths of the Christmas tree, that is.

Dresser Makeover

Greetings from the internet's least prolific blogger.

I've just been busy with mundane life stuff and not able to form thoughts into cohesive enough chunks to blog lately.  Plus I haven't done anything really interesting, haven't made anything really interesting, haven't gone anywhere interesting.  Or at least not interesting enough to blog about.  I mean, if you the blog-reading public want a post on cleaning litter boxes or brushing teeth, I'd be happy to oblige, but I just don't think there's a reading audience for it.  I may be wrong; feel free to correct me.

Anyhow, now that springtime has finally reached us here in Minnesota, I've been able to tackle a project I've been meaning to get done for a while, but I kinda needed to be outdoors to work on it.  What project is that?  Making over a small old dresser into a place to store our cold weather gear.  (Currently we use an old lidded basket that is overwhelmingly too small for a family of 5.  The cats enjoy using it to scratch their paws, so it's in fabulous shape, besides - if by fabulous you mean "falling apart at the seams.")

However, this thing

would make a great place to stash outerwear.  It's been sitting in our garage for the last two years.  Prior to that, it stored my husband's running gear in the basement of our old house.  Prior to that, one of the kids used it for a dresser.  I used it when I was a kid for a dresser, and when I asked my mom how old it was, she guessed that she got it in 1972, before I was even born.

Make no mistakes, this thing is old.  It's shabby (and not in a shabby-chic kind of way).  It's falling apart.  The hardware has oxidized.  And it wasn't even made out of high quality materials in the first place (particle board, staples, and glue for the most part).

But it was still useful, and rather than tossing it in the landfill, why not try to re-use it?

First I sanded down all the surfaces.

Removed the old, oxidized hardware.  Because the new hardware I was installing (more on that later) didn't fit the holes from the old hardware, I filled the holes with wood putty, let it dry, then sanded.

I put the dresser up on kitty litter buckets to make it easier to paint.  Speaking of making things easier to paint, if you're gonna do any spray painting, get yourself one of these:

That little trigger makes painting with spray paint so much easier.  It just snaps on to the top of your spray can and away you go.  It's reusable from can to can and only costs about $5.  

I didn't take any pictures of the painting process, but it was pretty straightforward.  Spray, let dry. Spray again, let dry. Done.

After the paint was dry, it was time to go to work on the new hardware.  At our old house, we had our kitchen cabinets resurfaced to make them more appealing for the sale.  We bought new fixtures, but never got around to installing them before we moved out.  Then they got lost in a box for a good 9 months before being rediscovered.  Unfortunately, that meant it was much too late to return them to the store.  I wanted to use them in our new house's kitchen, but because the drawer pulls don't line up, I'd have to redo the cabinets in this house too.  Just to install new hardware.  No thanks.  But now I've got a bag of hardware and no place to use it.  Lightbulb moment.

Here's the new stuff:

Kinda old-world and yet updated.

Like I said, the new hardware wouldn't work in the old hardware holes, so this wasn't a simple swap, but having a drill handy meant that it wasn't too difficult either.  In retrospect, I probably should have drilled the holes before I painted, but I was eager to paint.  I'm lucky that the drilling didn't wreck the paint, but again, we're talking about a cheap-o makeover here.  Buying another can of spray paint to fix an "oops" wouldn't have been a budget breaker.

So, dresser freshly painted, new hardware installed...we're done, right?  Not quite.  While digging for the drill, I found a can of chalkboard paint leftover from the previous owners.  It was unused, but since it had been sitting in the garage for 2 years or more, I tested it on some scrap wood first to see if it was still of good quality.  It was.  I decided that I would turn the side panels of the dresser (again, particle board with a very cheap veneer - we're not talking high quality wood here, folks) into chalkboards for the kids.

 
I covered the painted surfaces of the dresser with newspaper and taped off the edges, then spray painted away.  It took about 3 coats to get a nice, even finish.   (Helpful hint: when you create a chalkboard with chalkboard paint, wait until the paint is completely dry (usually 24 hours), then cover the entire surface with a smooth covering of chalk, then erase it all, before drawing on it for the first time.)

Wanna see the finished project:?
Voila:

Decorated with kid artwork, less than an hour later:

Side-by-side comparison:

At the end of the day, it's not perfect.  There's a few spots where I didn't apply paint evenly on the front, and there's a drawer pull that isn't level.  But overall, I'm happy with how it turned out.  It's plenty of well-hidden storage for our cold-weather gear, it's a nice surface just inside the door to on which to set things down, and it's added art space for the kids.