The Birthday Fairy is coming!!! Have I told you about the "Birthday Fairy" yet? It started a few years ago with Boo. I impulsively decorated the house the night before her birthday. I'll never forget the look in her eyes the next morning when she saw the beginnings of the decorations (crepe paper was strung & twirled in the stairwell by her bedroom.) She tip-toed down the stairs and looked into the living room and her eyes were HUGE! With a hushed voice, she said, "Mom! Who did this?!?" I told her that the "Birthday Fairy must've stopped by!" She fell hook, line & sinker for it. Hence, a new tradition was born!

Mind you, sometimes I just want to forget about doing it because I'm so DANG TIRED. But I don't. And so it comes to this... it's only 9:20ish and I am ready to go to bed! I'm all zapped out of energy & "mother-ness" and need to SLEEP! I do not want to stay up anymore to ensure the kids are soundly asleep for me to decorate. But I need to. Boo wouldn't understand why the birthday fairy didn't come for her little brother and be upset all day long.

Do you ever find yourself running on empty? I do. I try really hard to not let it affect my relationships with my kids & Hero but... it's really hard! More often than not, you'll find me deep into a book and totally oblivious to everything going on around me. I get mad if someone dares interrupt my reading time. Even if it's to say, "Mom! (insert something important)!" GRRR! So when I'm really just running on fumes, I get angry at myself for creating a tradition such as this or even a standard of living because it's ME that has to do the work and I resent myself for such a stupid thing. (It's not a stupid tradition and having a high standard of living is not necessarily a bad thing - I'm venting here.) Then I get angry at myself for escaping into books....

I do believe that it's all compounded by the fact that I have difficulty of shutting my brain off at night. I get so worked up that I am wide awake and ready for some serious karate-chopping. It's just dumb. I try the whole deep-breathing-count-backward-from-a-thousand-relaxing-my-body-starting-with-toes thing but nothing helps. Any suggestions?

Meanwhile, it's now 9:50ish pm and I think I might just relegate this Birthday Fairy to bed and ask Hero to decorate.... but I believe... no, I need to do it. I'll do it happily because I love Little Man and am so excited for him to turn THREE! :)