First, An Apology

Where do I begin?

First, an apology: I'm sooo sorry I have been absent from the website for months. I'd love to be able to offer some fantastic excuse, complete with a Voldemort-ian villain, a mind-numbing battle sequence, and a gripping love story, but the truth is decidedly more mundane.

I just couldn't keep up. I'm sorry. I feel terrible about it. Whatever you think about my lameness, rest assured I've thought 100 times worse things about myself.

Every day I feel as if I fall farther and farther behind in life, but never do I feel it more acutely than during the last quarter of the year.

Starting with two kids' birthdays in October and running right through the holidays into the beginning of the year, I can't seem to catch my breath. Baking  birthday cookies, wrapping gifts, baking birthday cakes, planning and executing parties, costume shopping, decorating for Halloween, school parties, undecorating for Halloween, fighting the colds and flus that make the rounds of the household, decorating for Christmas, holiday shopping, tree shopping, tree trimming, holidays parties, wrapping presents, baking cookies, baking more cookies, baking even more cookies, getting ready for houseguests, and trying to make everything come together in time for Christmas...it's a mind-boggling juggling act with which many parents are all too familiar. Throw in the usual homework battles, band and gymnastics and other activities, meals (those darn kids ask for food every day!), housework (ha!)...it's just more than I can handle. And to be perfectly honest, I had trouble managing it all when I was able-bodied.

But now that every task takes me 85 times longer to do...well, forget it. It's just inevitable that things fall through the cracks. There are not enough waking hours to squeeze it all in, and for anyone other than Jack Bauer, it's just not possible to keep going 24 hours a day. I already push myself and end up staying up far beyond what I know Dr. Siddique would recommend. 

But for as long as possible, I want to keep doing all the projects I've always done to make birthdays and Christmas special for my family. And there are some activities--like homework and meals--that are nonnegotiable. So, despite all of my good intentions of raising awareness and advocating for ALS, the website falls to the bottom of the list and settles there.

And now, here I am. Again, I'm sorry for the looong absence. I hope to get back in the swing of things and get back to more frequent updates. There are so many topics I wish I'd had time to write about over these last few months, and I'll try to go back and piece some of them together over the coming weeks.

In the meantime, I wish you a very belated "Happy Holidays," and I hope 2009 is off to a great start for you and yours.