Wrapping up before Christmas

As the end of the year approaches, kid obligations are in a lull and business slows thanks to the oncoming holidays, I finally have time to get to some of the things I've put off...some for a very long time.

First and foremost, I've had time to work on the sequel to Trust that was my NaNo Novel this year. As of this morning, I've cracked 80k. Woohoo! I'm aiming for 95-100 knowing that I have a lot of things earlier on that I can clean out during edits which will bring me back into the 90k range. Then its getting shelved for awhile so I can take Trust from the shelf where it's been resting since October and polish then launch into query round two.

Then comes one of the projects my kids dread: The mom cleaning of their rooms. The Purge. We started with an hour in each room. So far, two stacks of outgrown clothes, one huge box of books to be donated to my NaNo book drive, and a bulging bag of garbage. Round two tomorrow.

As I baked Christmas cookies this past weekend, I found myself needing my missing seventh cookie sheet to toss into the oven/staging rotation. (Yeah, there were a lot of cookies.) This poor cookie sheet as been sitting on top of my son's bookcase for...egads...umm...years? He'd been working on some little sand on stickers craft thing at the time and we put it away when he lost interest. You guessed it, he never got interested again. So on it was piled his scrapbook and everything that should have gone in it.

Now, I knew I was behind on this little motherly project, but as I unburied the cookie sheet (which was in pristine condition compared to is long used counterparts by the way), I discovered I'd not updated his scrapbook since second grade. He's in eighth this year. *headdesk*

Hours later, report cards tucked away, certificates proudly displayed, pictures attached, and birthday cards, movie stubs, artwork and award ribbons arranged, the much pared down pile was tucked neatly into the pages of the scrapbook and a stack of artwork and reports went into a box in the attic. Whew!

Tomorrow brings my daughters scrapbook, but that's only three years behind. Bah, no problem. Who am I kidding? *shudder*