Drill Seargent Mama

There is one day a year when I turn into a complete drill seargent. This is not to say that I don't have other days when I am bossy, but on this day I take it up to a professional level.  When a command is given it will be obeyed, quickly and without complaints. This transformation always occures on the day after Thanksgiving. 

This is when I like all of the Christmas decorations to go up inside the house. Of course to get that done you need 2 things.  The first thing you need is for the entire house to be cleaned from top to bottom.  The second thing you need is minions. Now in years past I have had very faithful and obedient minions, one adult and one child.  This year I should have had one faithful adult minion, one somewhat handy and overly curios little minion, and one cute but very non helpful minion.  Something went awry this year and my faithful and obedient adult minion managed to escape to the hills midmorning to terrorize fuzzy little bunnies. This was not before the entire house had been cleaned and he had received hundreds of commands.  The absense of my large minion caused caos in the ranks.  Usually large minion is responsible for bringing me all of the boxes, setting up the trees, putting lights on the outside of the house (if not already done), and keeping the little minions as far away as possible. Trying to set up 2 Christmas trees and boxes and boxes of decorations by myself was almost more than I could handle. Somehow even with all of the help from my little minions and the fact that half of the lights had burned out I managed to get it done.  Here's some proof.

This tree is our glass tree which the kids can't touch unless they want to be in BIG trouble.

Sadly this tree only had about half as many lights as usual. I am a Christmas light addict in regard to the trees.  You can never have too many.

This tree is the minions' tree which they helped decorate. That explains why 80% of the decorations are on the bottom third. I am sure it will get redecorated countless times before Christmas.

The minions went crazy over the toy train when it got set up.
 Minion #2 was in complete awe and minion #1 became the conductor/troll under the bridge.

The lights still aren't up on the outside of the house because large minion didn't take my "advice" to do it last week when it was unseasonably warm.  Now its so cold that your nose feels like it will fall off if you are outside for more thank a few minutes.  This means that large minion is on shaky ground with the seargent.  If the Christmas lights don't get up this year, its not going to be pretty come this time next year.

I am thinking I may need to throw in a few more drill seargent days in the year to give my troops more training.  Maybe Cinco De Mayo and Earth Day.  We'll see. 

Yesterday I aslo had to finish getting ready to go to a boutique in which I was attempting to sell some children's puzzles and things.  Unfortunantly we didn't get very many shoppers, but that is just how it goes sometimes.  I still had a nice day. The best part of my day was coming home to William who seemed to miss me more than anyone else.  He brought a blankie and sat and cuddled with me for a long time.  That was worth all of the money I could have made today. If anyone knows William you know that him cuddling is a miracle.  He never cuddles, but after tonight I have a glimmer of hope inside of me that maybe, just maybe he will learn to enjoy it.