this holiday season

Our runny noses here have started to turn into a cough. I'm just hoping everyone will be completely well before Christmas. I can't believe how fast it's coming! It still doesn't seem quite like the holidays yet. Maybe it's because I used to be able to get out more and do more Christmas shopping-that probably helped keep me feeling in holiday spirits. And I'm just more overwhelmed now, with three young children who need me for so much. The day to day stuff just keeps me occupied. Last night we finally brought up the Christmas stuff and started to decorate the tree. We didn't finish-only a small front section near the bottom of the tree is decorated. You know, where the kids can reach. There's a lot of ornaments that are difficult to hang. Either they just have small holes for putting on the branches or they're so heavy that you have to push them very far back on the branch and balance them on top of other branches. Why do they make ornaments so heavy nowadays? I also realized that I have a lot more stuff to decorate the house than I do ornaments for the tree.
Anyway, we'll have to finish the tree today and see if I can get any house decorating done. I made kiffles Monday night. It turned out rather depressing though. I haven't made them in years and years and I didn't remember exactly how to roll them out, or how much filling to put in. The recipie was my great-grandmother's, and she just knew it in her head. My Aunt as a teenager wrote down what she saw her grandmother doing, that's the reason we have the recipie. So it's not spelled out exactly the way it would be in a modern cookbook. If you put too much dough around the filling or too little, they split in the oven. And then I kept having to stop and pull Timothy off the table. He was crying for me to hold him practically the entire time. So it was just really difficult to get the right feel for it. Leanna and Justin didn't like them, which I pretty much expected. Then Tom came over to me and said, Hey that really stinks! And didn't understand why I was offended. He just said it at the wrong time-I was feeling bad because they weren't turning out exactly right and it's a fair amount of work to make them, especially when your own family doesn't like them, and it was hard to do with constant interruptions from the kids. I just feel like nothing has been working out the way it's supposed to this holiday season. We're going to try the cookie thing again this weekend with Laura. Cross your fingers for us that it goes better than the other attempts!! I need something to go right!