TGIF for the holidays

It's not really a stressful week unless I complain about it on my blog, so here goes: It's been A Week.

• One of the main reasons that this week finally got to me, yesterday (a Thursday), is that of course, I let any notion of exercise completely drop. First. The first thing I do is stop doing 10 minutes of exercise and 10 minutes of stretching. If I'm going to feel stressy, I am going to Go For The Gold of stressy and not even help myself. Duh.
• It hasn't been THAT much worse than our regular weeks, honestly. The kids have had after-school activities on T/W/Th of every week this semester. This week we added in an Alex band rehearsal Monday afternoon (requiring pickup), basketball team photos Tuesday at 5, concert Tuesday night, a holiday dinner for my office last night, and Kate's Christmas program tonight. Okay, well, maybe that is a lot of additional stuff. But we managed it fine, really, swapping pick-ups and drop-offs and what-not. I don't know why it felt so HEAVY. It just all happened in the same week, that's what.
• The weather's been crappy, that's another thing. When it is below 30 degrees, I don't feel right making Alex walk to the bus stop, call me crazy. (I WOULD, if the kid would WEAR HIS COAT, but he won't.) And it isn't a huge deal to drop him off at school, but it does push back my work-arrival time a little, which makes me eeeeek. I don't know why, no one cares but me.
• There's been a bit of hurried Christmas-gift-getting at the lunch-hours when I can get out, and the traffic on the street between my suburban office building and the shopping area is Stupid Traffic. I have been able to get most of what I need -- haha, "need", so that the kids have 8 gifts each from Mr. Claus and a few from "us" (does Kate still actually believe or not? The world may never know) -- and also to the UPS store twice, to ship packages to the family we won't see this year. I love the UPS store for how easy they make it, by packing AND shipping, but they do charge an arm and a leg, sheesh. 
• Work. I do actually have a lot of work to do right now, and it's the very definition of soul-sucking: I'm rewriting old website articles and basically keyword-stuffing them. It makes me sad to produce such ugly prose but I am being directed to by one of the 7 agencies that our boss has contracted with, to tell us everything we do wrong. Basically. Anyway, the days are FULL with trying to get all those articles re-worked before our Dec. 14 deadline. Oh, hello, it is today.
• At least I skipped choir this week. Did myself one favor. 
• I also made Kate skip singing in the children's choir at all this year, because I couldn't fathom how to fit it into the schedule. She told me the other day that her choir-friends have solos for Christmas. (And she doesn't.) So now I feel really bad about that, when I was just trying to practice SELF-CARE.

Oh well. It's nearly over. I'm ready for a reset with 8 days off in a row. I can think about holiday menus next week maybe! :)