It’s happening again, that crazy Blogger’s Paradox: the more interesting my life is, the less time I have to blog about it. Or as Brenda said, she only blogs when her life is boring.

I have half-written posts in my drafts about Part 2 of Tourist Tuesday and SuperChic’s birthday party, and a few dozen photos on my hard drive waiting for editing and uploading to Flickr. On Thanksgiving I barely took any photos because I knew I was already so far behind, I didn’t want any more photos hanging over my head, which is a really stupid reason not to take pictures. Granted, I was busy hosting a dinner and preparing food and stuff. I still could have shoved the camera at someone and grabbed Annalie and had them take a photo of us, but noooo, didn’t do that. The only photos of me and Annalie that day were taken after we were already in our pajamas, with Photo Booth.

All of that to say, today was a day of rest after a very busy week, and we took full advantage of it. Annalie and I hung out on the couch, ate snacky food, snuggled under blankets, and watched an Avatar: The Last Airbender marathon with the cats. I know I’m a few years behind the times with this show, but we’ve only just discovered it and it’s fantastic. I’m not sure who likes it more, me or Annalie.

We kept the lights on the Christmas tree turned on all day, which added to the sense of coziness. I don’t think I’ve ever put up a Christmas tree so early before, but I rather like having it up. We don’t have any other Christmas decorations up this year, except for a few assorted homemade wreaths. Oh, and all of last year’s Christmas cards are still up. Yes, really. I meant to take them down, but after a while I thought the wall would look really bare without them so I just left them all up. It’s been rather nice to look at everyone’s photos all year long. I’ll take them down once we start getting this year’s cards.

I sat out on the deck for a while with a cup of coffee, listening to the rain. That made me ridiculously happy. I don’t know why rain has that power to cheer me up so instantly, but it does. So do Christmas-tree lights.

As long as I get a few relaxing rainy days and can go about my days bathed in the gentle glow of Christmas-tree lights, I think I can handle all the craziness ahead. I might even manage to blog about some of it.

Photo taken by Brenda

When Heather arrived at my house today for the vanilla-making party (more on that soon) she was wearing the exact same brown Target t-shirt and dark-rinse blue jeans that I happened to be wearing. It was pretty funny.

Today was a good day. Annalie and I hung out at home in our jammies most of the morning. We had peanut butter & jelly sandwiches for lunch. After lunch, Annalie spent almost an hour telling me an elaborate story about how she was born in Mexico but her parents couldn’t take care of her so she had to live at a children’s helping place and then we adopted her, but not before her abuela taught her how to cook a soup with carrots…only they aren’t really carrots, they’re yellow onions and they have to be cut up very small. That last part she told me while she was using a paring knife to chop up five or six baby carrots into 1/4-inch pieces, which she then put in a bowl and snacked on while she watched The Electric Company.

We ran some errands, including the pottery studio, where I was just going to pick up a couple of mugs to paint later. But while we were there, Annalie said she wanted to paint something. Usually I’m lucky if she’ll paint for ten minutes, and then I’ll try to distract her with snacks for another half-hour before giving up and coming back another day to finish my project. Today I was able to almost finish both mugs (and would have completely finished them except I didn’t have information I needed to write something on the bottom of the mugs). Annalie knew exactly what she wanted to do, and spent 45 minutes painting one thing, then almost as long painting a second item. I offered to wrap my mugs up and take her home when she was done, but she said, “No, that’s okay. I’ll color with markers till you’re done.” And that was on top of earlier today when she was going downstairs for some reason, and she turned back and said, “Can I get you a snack while I’m downstairs? Or a Diet Coke maybe?”

As some commenters noted on my last post, 5 1/2 is just one of those ages where there’s a lot of questioning and challenging going on with most kids. And Annalie certainly does miss her daddy. We talk about Troy all the time and pray for him every night. We take a photo for him every day, and she’s always drawing him pictures or typing him emails. Goodness knows that when I am having a bad day, I’m often thinking Waaah, I want Troy! so it makes perfect sense that she’d be thinking the same thing when she’s having a bad day.

I’m sure we’ll have plenty more time-outs and talks about anger and not letting your temper get the better of you, but for now things are back to normal. Maybe even a little better than normal.

*Troy asked me what the title of this post meant, since it seemed like the day I wrote about had been a pretty good day. It’s actually a line of the song “Bad Day” from Barenaked Ladies’ album SNACKTIME!, the one they wrote with kids in mind. You can find the lyrics and play the song here.