Was I having a seizure, perhaps? Did I lose control of the car? No. I was trying to unwrap a stick of gum, and steered right into it. Since I was running sort of late, I backed up a bit and steered right around the toppled can and drove off, chomping my gum and hooting like a baboon over it.

Luckily, there was no damage to the car (I collided with it at like half a mile an hour, a glancing blow rather than a straight on hit) and none to the plastic can. And I got the kids on time, too. And got the bag back in the can and the whole thing standing up before anyone noticed. I hope.

I'm still cracking up.

Truth is, I took a two week vacation from work and in order to keep myself honest (and vacationing) I kept the computer turned off. Same with my cell phone. Once the twitching stopped, it was downright refreshing.

Now, with less than 24 hours remaining, I'm slowly getting myself used to the idea that I'll be back in the saddle, bright and early tomorrow. I'm thinking I need another week or two, but you know, schools, work... they aren't as flexible about these things. I'm pwned by The Man.

With the kids out of school for their winter break, we spent the few days before Christmas in a frenzy of familial togetherness. They baked cookies with my mom and dad, and we hooked up my husband's present - digital cable, finally - and watched 700 hours of television and movies as it rained softly outside. Christmas Eve, we spent the evening with my parents at their home, and opened a few gifts, and shared a nice dinner. My son made his "famous" lasagne, which was well-received by the whole gang.

He's a funny kid, very sensitive and eager to have people notice his contributions. I understand that, being a middle child myself, with two vibrant siblings on either side of me. Except the whole sensitive thing - that's all him. Anyway, having a signature dish to prepare has put quite a bounce in his step. I might do a special recipe video blog for it in the near future.

Christmas night, my oldest placed three Tiger's Milk bars and a glass of chocolate almond milk for Santa and some celery for the reindeer. I tried to convince her that the lovely cookies she helped make would be a better plan, but she insisted. Santa needs some protein, apparently.

All night, the kids struggled to fall asleep, excited by what the morning would bring. My oldest came to sleep with us first, fretting that she couldn't fall asleep and worried that Santa would pass us by. My son and youngest came next, and Christmas morning dawned with all five of us crammed in our king sized bed. We made it until 6:30 this year!

The kids were thrilled with their gifts, and as usual, it was hilarious to see which of the gifts really made a huge splash. My youngest practically hyperventilated over a grocery-store plastic jewelry set. She spun in circles and trilled little bursts of song over it. Meanwhile, the new bike from Santa got a warm reception, but no singing or spinning.

After spending a quiet day at home, and tucking the kids in early on Christmas night, it hit me - this was the sweetest, most enjoyable Christmas we've spent with all three kids - and I think that is all due to the fact that my life is so hectic now that a peaceful couple of days with no fighting kids and no place to go and plenty of time to talk and relax and just be together made it a wonderful respite from the day-to-day.

I'm trying to decide whether to post about my New Year resolutions - it seems like the kiss of death. We'll see.

One of them is to post five days a week.

Y: I still haven't bought half of my presents, so I KNOW. Have fun out there with all of God's people - try not to knife anyone because I SWEAR

Jenny: I know a side exit

Y: people are *ssholes haha. "side exit"

Jenny: In case I get overcome by The Spirit

Photos soon, if I don't shank anyone and have to make a break for it.

And yet! Who just spent over an hour wrapping gifts - and has barely made a dent? Hint: not my husband.

I headed out into the cold (like 40 degrees - ARCTIC for this area) with my sister to do some shopping yesterday, and stumbled home 8 hours later with several bags of goodies and a belly full of Thai food.

Meiang Kam is the food of the angels. For reals, yo.

We celebrated her 6th birthday with three days worth of celebrations. First, we brought doughnuts to her kindergarten class, and then had a family dinner of steak and baked potatoes and salad. Can someone explain to me why my kid loves everything about steak, and can look at a slab of raw beef and be all - yummmmmmmmmmm?

I NEVER cook red meat - maybe once or twice every few months, and only under duress, and yet my kid flat-out requests steak. It is the weirdest darn thing ever. We grilled a couple of steaks, and I baked potatoes, and made some popovers to boot. I had forgotten how much popovers rock. Go out and make yourself some right now. I mean it.

Anyhoo, after clearing away the dinner dishes, my parents and sister joined us for ice cream cake. It was really lovely. It cracked me up that the kid wore her paper crown for three straight days. I should really get her a rhinestone tiara as much as she enjoyed it - but then again, I think maybe I'm projecting and I should just ask Santa for a tiara of my own.

The following morning, we headed off to the local Pump It Up to join my daughter's classmates for a party. The kids all jumped until they were exhausted, and the moms and I flailed around in the combat arena, while the dads played some air hockey. The party itself was fine, but once we got into the party room, they had cranked the temperature up to 80 degrees or something and it was like a sauna. We threw some cupcakes at the kids and opened presents at light-speed.

My daughter was thrilled to receive a Perler bead kit (which my friend Kim had called to ask if we already had - and then said, "You'll LOVE them," cackled manically and hung up on me when I said we didn't - because a bucket of 5,000 beads the size of salad macaroni... well... we haven't managed to upend it yet.) She also got a colored hair streaking kit, which hello! I'm totally going to be streaking my hair now. I know the gifts aren't about me, per se, but I think I'm being a smart parent testing it out on myself first. Right?

There were other really thoughful gifts, and I'm thinking Christmas is going to be pretty anticlimactic because we're really scaling back this year.

My oldest had her first sleep over guest this month too - she's spent the night elsewhere, but I've been reluctant to reciprocate, because I'm lazy like that. The girls stayed up until 11:30, painting toes and fingernails and giggling.

The following morning, we went to cut down our tree with my daughter's friend in tow. I took a bunch of photos that make it look like we were having a delightful time, but my youngest and son were throwing tantrums the whole time. A year from now, I totally won't remember, and you can't tell from the photos, so we're good.

I'm currently sitting on the couch with a crackling fire in the fireplace, all three kids curled up watching a holiday special on TV and I'm looking at the little ceramic village that my grandmother painted for me before she died. I was never close to my grandmother - in fact, we had nicknamed her "Grambo" due to her aggressive personality. Yet every year when I pull out the little village, there's a twinge of memories, and I know that she made these for me (and all of the other women in my family) as a special gift. She loved the holidays, or so my mom says. And so I set them on the mantle, and think of the grandmother I really didn't know well.

At this sleepy time of year, when the days are short and the year is coming to a close, surrounded by keepsakes and traditions, it makes me wonder if I'm doing enough now. Will my children have doubt about my feelings? Will I be spending the last years of my life painting keepsakes to pass on, in the hopes that I'll be remembered during my favorite time of the year?

You know what I need? Some eggnog. I'm getting way too philosophical. Although perhaps one day I'll have a good answer why I've hung up 6 stockings for my family of five, plus two for the pets. Hint - I have no plans to add to the family, but it looks more balanced, and I haven't really got any clue other than that.

We brought the bag home with the little fella on Monday, and put him on the couch. So, I mean, technically, he's watched me whoop some little-kid butt in Wii Lego Star Wars, and he's witnessed the dog chewing on her butt a few times, and has caught a few episodes of Mythbusters. That's not nothing.

I flipped through the previous journal entries. Oh great. The other parents took the stuffed animal to the grocery store and to the dentist and to the beach and to San Francisco and to all sorts of places. I turned to my scowling daughter and said, "Well, we can use our creativity and imagination to enhance our time with Lucky!"

"You mean lie?"

"Um, no. Embellish!"

"Mooooooo-ooooom!"

I made her take it out in the yard and push it down the slide twice. Whee! Lucky totally had fun with that.

I also caught the dog trying to sneak off with Lucky in her mouth and pulled off a rescue. My dog likes to chew button eyes off of stuffed animals. That and she likes to chew on her butt. I am sure I can weave those details into a scintillating tale appropriate for a 5-year-old audience. They like anything to do with butts, farts and underpants.

I've finally tucked the kids in for the night, and shoved Lucky under the covers next to my daughter. She's oblivious, but we can totally write that she slept with him - which is another common theme in all the other entries.

Shoot. I'm going to go extract him from the bed and give him a ride in the washing machine. All those cooties - ick.

So - let's recap. We went from nothing to observing the natives, learning about science (maybe, depending on the episodes) being snatched from the jaws of certain dismemberment, some righteous butt chewing and butt kicking, a few harrowing drops down the slide of doom and now some white-water rafting. I'd say Lucky's having a great week.

That's okay, though. I'm all hopeful and stuff. A good part of this optimism is due to the fact that my mom recommended a possible teenaged mother's helper for me, and I'm totally counting my chickens before I've even gathered the eggs here, but seriously, I've needed backup for over a year, and I haven't been able to coordinate it. The plan is to have her come over after school for a couple of hours so I can work in relative peace while the kids play and do their homework and master Wii games that I'm not interested in.

Here's the thing. I know other parents have help - but I've marooned myself on an island since my kids were tiny. I told myself that I could and should do it all without help. Even working full-time, a decision that should have made hiring childcare assistance a no-brainer didn't motivate me. I couldn't ever get the house company-ready clean enough to hire help for the kids or the house, or couldn't justify the expense of hiring a sitter, or didn't know where to start looking. I told myself that the occasional break provided by my parents would have to do, and continued to wallow in a lonely swamp of my own making.

And now, I've got the phone number for a possible mother's helper. (And the number of a professional organizer, too, but dude, just had expensive car repairs and property taxes. That is going to have to wait.) And even if this isn't the right mother's helper for my family, that torch has been lit. There will be help. Once again, my mom has delivered a well-timed boot in the butt.

I'm realizing that I totally botched an opportunity to have Christmas gift-giving managed easily this year by handing out copies of Sleep Is for the Weak
to family and friends already. I'm going to have to fall back on the kids' school portraits, or maybe a bunch of cookies because we're keeping our holiday gift giving to small, thoughtful gifts this year- especially for the grown ups. And nothing says thoughtful like cookies, right?

In a slight departure from my normal drill, I've actually invited children to my youngest's 6th birthday with a full two-weeks notice. Go me! We might actually have some kids attend this year. December birthdays sort of suck, I think. And of course, my spoiled little dahlinks don't need a single thing, so trying to find a "wow" gift is really an exercise set up to fail. She wants a bike for some reason - baffling really, since I don't think she actually wants to RIDE a bike. No, she just wants to have one.

I think they get this from me, actually. My oldest was like that too, wanting to take riding lessons but totally not wanting to ride the horses. I like the concept better than the reality in most cases. I don't know what that makes me, besides pathetic. If only I could wrap up concepts and place them under the tree this Christmas.

In new developments, I had a mole removed from my thigh in October and the darn thing is still all purple and scar-looking. I am ready for it to heal already. It's not infected, but it looks way more dramatic than the mole did. All this is making me leery, since I have sprouted some sort of little skin tag or mole on the inner corner of my eye. You wouldn't even notice it if I didn't point it out, but it is bugging the crap out of me, I want to get rid of it, but I'm worried that any surgical improvement would result in a big purple blotch where my eye used to be. I've got an overactive imagination.

Let's see - overactive imagination and favors concepts over reality... any wonder why I am so comfortable on the internet?

Just add in an imaginary pony and a cool nickname and I'm all set.

Granted, some are size four, and some are size six, and since the size fours still fit her, and the size sixes are a little big... anyway. PANTY EXPLOSION.

My daughter surprised me the other day by poking her head around the kitchen island and saying "wanna see my butt?"

"No, not really," I said. "I've seen enough tiny hiney to last me. I'm good."

She leaped around the counter, jazz hands flailing and a squeaky giggle percolating out of her. She had put on all 21 pairs of panties, and wanted me to watch while she took them off, one by one.

So, okay. I sat there and giggled along with her as she revealed her 21 layers - "I'm like an onion! Like Shrek!" she said - and then ordered her to put all the excess back in her drawer, and put some regular pants on, it's winter, geez.

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I got a call from the hubs at work, panting and slightly hysterical sounding. Before I could get panicked myself, he blurted out the story:

He was sitting at his desk, working away, when he felt a little tickle on his knee. Was it a spider? He reached down and gingerly patted his leg. It felt... squishy.

He leaped out of his chair, knocking it over in the process, and shook his leg vigorously, flapping his pant leg. Out plopped a very small mouse.

The mouse stared in shock at my husband. My husband stared in shock at the mouse. And then the mouse headed in one direction and my husband headed in the other.

When I say headed, I mean ran screaming like a little girl through the halls of his office. By the time he reached this point of the story, I was collapsed on the floor in my kitchen laughing like a loon. He was all - "Jenny, this could have been that day where you got a call from some ER doctor informing you that I had a heart attack." And I just went on howling. Nice, huh?

The end of the story - they set a trap and caught the mouse in 10 minutes. My husband's reputation as a macho man may be damaged for good. Only time will tell.

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I was supposed to go into the BlogHer offices on Wednesday, but about an hour into my drive, my husband's rickety car started billowing white smoke from under the hood. I made my way to the shoulder quickly, and as I pulled over, a truck with two men pulled over 50 feet from me and one came running back yelling - Ma'am, I'm a firefighter, and you need to get out of that car RIGHT NOW.

Oooh! Firefighter!

After I grabbed my laptop bag and iPhone from the seat next to me, I stepped out on the pavement. The firefighter grabbed his fire gloves and opened the hood, where we were greeted by a final blast of white smoke, and a puddle of anti-freeze under the car.

Not two minutes later, the highway rescue patrol or something like that showed up, and towed me off the next exit, where I was dropped outside a McDonalds.

I called my husband, sent a few text messages, twittered about my woes, kicked the bumper of the car a few times, bought some coffee and called AAA. Within 30 minutes, I was riding high in the cab of a flat-bed tow truck, heading to the repair shop, in the company of the world's most chatty driver. He's a proud papa, that one, and I was happy for the distraction.

After dropping off the car, I "worked" via iPhone until my husband could come get me. The car is still in the shop today. We really should just buy a new car, but we're both ridiculous about trying to make a decision, so we replaced the radiator and the engine fan (we being the guys at the shop) and I guess it will be done today? I don't know. Hopefully that will let us get through until Jan/Feb so we can actually make an educated decision about what we'd like to purchase next. We're not much for the impulse buying.

All things considered, it wasn't really dramatic. I keep saying "the car BLEW UP!" ON THE FREEWAY!" but it really just belched some white smoke and leaked some fluid. Okay, a lot of fluid. But I got a firefighter and two different tow-trucks and THAT has got to count for something.

The one great thing about Mondays is the kids go off to school en masse, and I have some productive time. Of course, tomorrow is a school holiday, and all three hoodlums are at home for the day.

I'm horrible - my children are not hoodlums. More like apprentice hoodlums. Send chocolate.

This weekend, my youngest lost her first tooth. Seeing that gap in her baby choppers brings a smile to my face - I love the jack-o-lantern look. We served the traditional meal of spaghetti - which is slurpable through tiny gaps - and the tooth fairy brought a gold dollar for her. She's very proud.

We also celebrated my mom's birthday by putting my children in a cage.

As you can probably tell, I need to get out more.

Rather than traverse the cold linoleum to the table in bare feet (and rather than getting a pair of socks from the dryer, where there are probably 700) I opted to do a combination between a penguin walk and The Twist over to the table. I almost fell down once, but it was fun. I'd do it again.

Now, two hours later, I've still got both feet wrapped in a dish towel. My husband is wearing sensible slippers. HOW BORING.

(I have slippers - they got wet yesterday when I ran out to the mailbox and forgot they were on. Do not panic.)

Halloween was really pleasant this year - we got a lucky break in the rain twice - once so that the kids could have their parade at school, and once so that the neighborhood costume contest and trick-or-treating could happen unimpeded by umbrellas. The kids weren't as eager to race from house to house this year - and we only visited about 20 houses or so before all three kids were ready to head home for the night. In a shocking turn of events, all three kids were in bed by 9, and the husband and I were asleep - out cold asleep - by 10 pm. We know how to party.

All through the night the rain was drumming on the walls and ceiling, and I woke up still exhausted the next morning. I've been having some crazy dreams lately, very active ones that get my heart racing and probably make me flail and talk in my sleep, although the hubs hasn't mentioned anything. Of course, he sleeps like a log. Something about the rain makes me want to hibernate - at least the first rains of the year, at any rate. By 11 am, I was curled back in bed, re-reading Twilight and dozing in turns.

On a side note, why am I the last person on the planet to have read Twilight
? Were you people holding out on me? Holy moly, I just finished devouring all four novels. I'm going to make my sister go see the movie with me when it comes out - something tells me we won't be the only 30-somethings in a sea of teens.

After a drowsy day spent snuggling with the kids, reading and eating candy, I finally felt like my batteries were recharged, and I spent Sunday being productive. Maybe it is only that the skies were marginally sunny. Maybe it is because the hubs actually picked up and did dishes and swept the floor without me having to ask for help. I don't know. Seeing my face in the spot-free bathroom mirror this morning made me feel like I am ready to take on the week.

Maybe, that is...once I finish this cup of tea.

While I steered myself down the hallway towards the coffee pot, the kids cranked up the electronic keyboard and began to randomly select songs for it to play. After a few hilariously over the top arrangements of the Sugar Plum Fairy song and Yankee Doodle, they landed on a Ricky Martin favorite - La Vida Loca.

All three kids danced and danced through two play-throughs, and then the older two wandered off. My five-year-old, however, continued to dance and sing. She's living Lavina Yoka, baby.

And therefore, we all are. Join us?

Still in the parking lot, we circled up and introduced ourselves by name, and then we were supposed to say what we like to do outside. When the very nice, Nordic-named Nature Educator got to me, I stammered out my name and declared that "I like to hike!" This is blatantly false. I do not like hiking, at least not since I have children who like to whine-n-walk. But I don't know, that fit, tanned woman in sensible hiking boots pinned me with her icy blue stare and I blurted "I like to hike!"

"Good," she said. "Good, because we're going to be doing a lot of hiking today!"

Whoopie.

Look, when I signed up for this gig, I thought we were going to have a little visit to some sort of cabin with a few stuffed birds and maybe some rocks. Maybe have a little story or look at photos. I didn't know about the hiking. And within two seconds of getting there, I realized maybe a sweater set was not the right kind of layers, but there it was. I blurted "I'm Jenny, er, Mrs. Lauck, and I like to hike!"

Our fearless educator took off up the trail with the kids fanning out behind. The trail headed straight up the side of a hill, and I climbed alongside my fellow accompanying mother, who had blurted "I like to swim!" which got a stern nod of approval from our Nature Goddess during our earlier circle time.

By the first pit stop, I was panting. It was u.g.l.y. and I didn't have no alibi. Once again, we gathered the kids into a circle and watched as Nature Lady yanked prop after prop after prop out of her backpack. She had diagrams and models of the earth and samples of rocks and baking powder and vinegar to make a volcano (on the fly, even) and all sorts of stuff. Which was cool, and all, but we stayed in that spot learning and passing around stuff for a good 30 minutes.

Once we got back underway, the kids were tasked to find examples of the three different types of rocks. We learned the names but I was busy gossiping about the PTA volunteer activities and didn't really follow the whole lecture. All I know is the kids spent the next little bit scouring the ground for bits of obsidian and other special rocks, and my pockets slowly filled with stones.

Because not only do I like hiking? I like doing it with pockets full of rocks.

We didn't actually hike far, maybe 3/4 of a mile, stopping frequently for circles and teaching moments. I rubbed it in to the other mom with our group that I had a kid in my car who had to be back early - possibly cutting our "fun" short. Neeeeeeener.

After a quick lunch eaten while sitting on loose gravel, we herded the kids back into cars and headed back to school. It was good to be out in the fresh air and it meant the world to my daughter to have me there.