If there’s one thing I learned today, it’s this:  if you leave your Christmas decorations up until the end of February, your children will continue to celebrate Christmas.  At least, mine will.

We had two major missions for this weekend:  1. make some attempt at reclaiming the house from the disaster than resulted from having house guests while simultaneously all being sick and 2. try to get some rest so we could all finally kick said illness.  We did pretty well.  The whole house got vacuumed (thanks Dan), the sheets and bedding got taken off of the futon (although we left it set up as a “bed”, we figured that supported goal #2, and Benjamin really likes it that way), and I caught up on every bit of especially dirty laundry (from said illness).  We also managed to have a relatively quiet and restful day today, after a busy day cleaning yesterday.  As of this evening, Dan & I think we’re nearly at 100% and Liam has stopped having explosive diapers 5-6 times per day.  Benjamin still has a cough, but his fever seems minimal, even without medicine.  We didn’t quite get all the way there, but the state of our health, and the state of the house, are significantly improved from Friday.  Success!

That being said, my Christmas decorations are still up.  (I also have not yet sent out our Valentine’s Day cards — at this point it’s anyone’s guess which is going to happen first.)  Among them are the construction paper Christmas trees that the boys and I made and decorated with stickers.  This evening, Benjamin suggested that we get the stickers out and decorate them some more.  My first thought was, “Well, it’s not Christmas.”  But then I switched to, “Why not?”  If I’m going to leave the decorations up until the end of February (at least) we might as well enjoy them.  So, out came the stickers.  Both Liam and Benjamin really enjoyed their Christmas decorating, February or not.  (Liam is becoming very patient with the process, and significantly more opinionated about which stickers we use.)

So, yet again, it’s still Christmas here.  In February.  Merry Christmas to all, and to all a good night, and God bless us, every one!