So much to say, so little time

But I blame Santa Claus. You see, here’s how yesterday went:

Julianna was screaming with abdominal pain, the school district decided it was far too cold to have school, and for this and other reasons, I was late getting showered.

I snagged a look at the NFP chart while I was grabbing Julianna’s glasses from the night stand (where they’d been ever since naptime on Monday), looking to forecast the next few days. And then I got distracted by something, and—poof! The glasses vanished.

All day (between stolen writing moments, a library run and caring for Julianna) I sifted through the clutter on the counter and table, visiting and revisiting all the places I might have taken the glasses. But the usual foolproof method–retrace your steps–failed me, because I could not remember what those steps were. (Blame that on sixteen straight nights of caring for sick kids.) By dinnertime, I was feeling anxious. Christian came home and began looking in all sorts of odd places: on top of the refrigerator, in the utensil drawer… After dinner, we followed each other all over the house, Christian repeatedly asking, “What did you do this morning?” in the hopes that I’d magically remember. And then, standing in the closet at 6:27p.m., when it was time to load the kids into van, he discovered the glasses, perched atop a blue sweater that I did not remember putting in the back half of the closet where I spend virtually zero time.

And just like that, I recovered my lost memory engrams.

Santa, you see, brought a box of six Justice League action figures for Alex for Christmas, but Mommy and Daddy thought the pile of loot was getting out of hand. So Santa pulled out Hawk Girl and Superman for Christmas, then put Wonder Woman, Green Lantern & co. on the shelf in the closet to wait for Alex’s birthday. He hid it under the summer bedspread, up on the  wire shelf.

But yesterday morning when I went in to grab a sweatshirt, I saw that the bedspread, which had always perched rather precariously, had fallen to the floor, leaving the JL figures in plain sight. I dropped everything on the nearest flat surface and fixed the camouflage, an operation requiring an unreasonable amount of brain power considering its simplicity, and by the time I was done, I’d forgotten everything I had set down—and even the fact that I had set them down.

So you see, it’s all Santa’s fault. Because if Santa had done a better job hiding the toys, I wouldn’t have lost Julianna’s glasses. If I hadn’t lost Julianna’s glasses, we wouldn’t have been scrambling to find the glasses before, during and after dinner. And if we hadn’t been scrambling to find the glasses, we could have focused more on minor details like grabbing the music list on the way out the door.

Darn that Santa Claus.