Manic Monday

The day started off all right, I remembered that I had forgotten to post my Advent candle picture and participate in Toni’s ‘Quotable Sunday‘, but took care of that right away. No problem. Moving on. 😉 Gave the Little Princess a bath this morning since she got dirty right before bedtime last night and I couldn’t have her going to school looking like that! I personally think that she got dirty on purpose – since it was so close to bedtime – so she could stay up late by taking her sweet time in her bath. Ha! Didn’t work on me. She just went to bed dirty. So of course that meant rushing through bath time and getting her ready for school this morning instead. Today was ‘pajama’ day at school for the story time reading of ‘The Polar Express‘, so she got to put on her Christmas Barbie jammies before heading to school. It was weird sending her to school in her PJ’s, but she did look awfully cute! 😉

Once she was on the bus, this was my chance to race to the attic to get the rest of the items I needed to make some gift baskets for her teacher and bus drivers. And the groomer who takes such good care of Elvis. Our house is old – almost 200 years old to be exact, and the people that had the house before us finished the attic. It will be a great ‘craft room’ for me once I can get the bazillion boxes organized (and get rid of a bunch of junk stuff I no longer need…and heat it for the winter and cool it for the summer), but for now I’m using it as storage. The door at the bottom of the stairs has one of those old fashioned hook latches, and the door opens outward. I have a couple…few…big stack of boxes stacked just outside that door that I need to move up to the attic, but I’ve been putting that off. For awhile. Did I do that today? No. I simply moved the boxes out of the way enough to get the door open, and raced up the stairs. Little did I know my Little Princess had placed a very large purple ball on one of the boxes, then Dada put a small box on top of that with the Little Princess’s Halloween costume on top of that. When I ‘bumped’ the boxes it was on and went into the attic stairs, the ball rolled off, causing a small avalanche of boxes which pushed the attic door closed. After I was in the stairway of the attic. Uh oh.

When we first moved into this house I had my desk up there with my desktop computer. The router and phone were up there too, before we upgraded our technology and got wireless routers and laptop computers. Now there’s nothing up there. Except stuff. Lots of stuff. No phone. No computer. Just stuff. And now me. Stuck. I decided to make the most of it before I had to figure out how to get the door open again from the inside and find what I needed to find so I wouldn’t have to go back up there later. I found all the stuff I was looking for, then headed back down the steps to the closed door. The latch at least hadn’t done what it did one other time I was stuck in the attic, at least this time part of the latch was open, which meant I only had to use a pencil or something to lift it up and unlock the door. Cool. I had a pen, good enough. Only the avalanche of boxes outside the door were effectively keeping the door mostly closed. I could get my arm out. But that’s not going to suffice to meet my Little Princess at her bus when she returns from school. Then I spied that stupid purple ball. If I could just reach it, I could effectively ‘shift’ the avalanche and get the door open wider – maybe enough to shimmy through.

The purple ball was just beyond my reach. But amongst all my junk treasures, I knew I had some sort of stick or broom handle or something I could use. Now to find it. About 15 minutes later, I found a stick I could use to move the ball. Nothing like fishing for a purple ball while stuck behind the attic door. Hallelujah! Once the ball was pried free from the avalanche, the boxes shifted just enough for me to shove the door open for me to slide through. But first I had to push the crafty things I had gone to the attic to get so my trip up there wouldn’t be a total loss. Then I was able to shimmy through the small opening out into the hallway. Success! Nothing like getting stuck in the stairwell of the attic to motivate one to finally move that stack up boxes up into the attic where they were headed to begin with. So I did. But now my ‘free’ time was coming to an end, it would be time to meet the Little Princess at her bus.

Since we didn’t get a chance to make Christmas cookies over the weekend, we had to do it today so she can take some to school with her tomorrow. So after she got off the bus, she immediately wanted to make cookies. Cool. I got all the ingredients put into a bowl for her and let her mix it all up – knowing it would take her longer than it would me, so I could get the gift basket stuff organized on the dining room table for ease of creation later. Worked like a charm! Cookies done…check! Gift baskets almost complete…check! I can shrink-wrap the baskets in the morning before she heads to school tomorrow afternoon, then run around and drop them off and if I don’t get a chance to wrap the last few gifts before she gets home from school, I’ll just have to get up super early on Wednesday morning to take care of them before she wakes up. Luckily she shouldn’t be awake before 9:00 a.m., she’s not a morning person like I am, so unless she suspects something, I should be safe! 😉

I think one of my resolutions for the New Year is to stop procrastinating on the unimportant things…like a stack of boxes outside the attic door that need to be in the attic. Then I won’t have to burn over an hour of my ‘free’ time getting stuck when I don’t have time to burn! Oh, and I think the next time I make a trip up to the attic, I’ll bring my cell phone with me. 😉