It's beginning to look a lot like...

So I'm really falling down on the blogging thing this week.  The closer to the end of the year I get, the worse job I'm doing.  I think it's a combination of blogging fatigue and the fast-approaching holidays.  Our church has a daily schedule for Bible reading, and I kept up with it all last year until the week of Thanksgiving, at which point it just all ended until I got back to it with the good intentions of the new year.  So far this year, I'm about 4 days behind on it, all of which has happened since Halloween.

Halloween is the archway with "Abandon hope, all ye who enter here" inscribed on it in the calendar.  From there, the final two months of the year just turn into a avalanche which gathers speed until it deposits me, stunned and breathless, in January.  Have to buy a turkey; have to make pies; have to shop; have to clean; have to decorate; have to wrap presents sometime before Christmas morning; have to find the Christmas music (the last three years, I have never found my crate of Christmas CDs until after Christmas); have to buy Christmas cards, then have to get them mailed.  And this year, I never even finished thank-you notes from my birthday eight months ago!  And I haven't answered e-mail since Valentine's Day.  And I haven't mailed anyone a birthday card since April when I could never get my hands on photos of the kids, cards, a calendar, and my address book all at the same time, and when I could, there was so much piled on the dining room table, I couldn't even sit down to write them until I cleared it off....

2011.  Tough year for getting things done.  I'm taking the next two weeks off homeschool (except for minimal reading and math to keep them from regressing) and will try to get some of the above conquered.  I will pay with tears when I have to get them back into the daily lesson rut afterwards, but I need some time off.  More importantly, I need not to waste the time off I take.