whoosh

...and it's gone!
December is nearly done, and 2010 is pretty much behind us.

My goal of daily blogging fell flat before I even began, but that's okay.  It was a whirlwind month of stress, anxiety and sadness that culminated with great release and relief at about 5:30am Christmas morning.  I cannot express clearly my stress leading up to the Christmas and how relieved I was on Christmas morning when everything fell into place as I hoped.  The children were happy wi ththeir gifts; I was thrilled with mine.  Wayne accepted his gift from me with a polite smile (it was a heart rate monitor and iPod armband for working out and the new Deadmau5 CD).  He out-gifted me, as usual: a NookColor.  I love it!  I haven't been the voracious reader that I have been in the past, but I hope the NookColor will remedy that.  I am reading a couple books now on the Nook:

Everything I Needed to Know About Being A Girl I Learned from Judy Blume, which isn't as good as I hoped it would be.  It's a collection of short autobiographical stories from popular female authors, and some of them read like English 101 essays.  Some are really good, but some are just meh.  I think the concept is fabulous because it's such an accurate thesis.  I mean, didn't we, the women in my age group (40-ish), grow up learning all we needed to know from Judy Blume's characters?  Don't we all consider her a Goddess of YA fiction authors?  I know I do.  But one of the authors (can't remember which one) made a good point about Judy's books: they aren't as relevant to YA girls today.  I can't get Maya to Read Are You There, God?  It's me, Margaret.  She loved the Fudge books, but I read them to her a few years ago.  She re-read them last summer, but she wasn't inspired to move on to any other Judy Blume books.  It makes me sad.  Kids today are too savvy--and possibly too cynical-- to enjoy Judy Blume books without rolling their eyes and thinking the content is dated.  I can't speak about any of Judy Blume's other books, but the Fudge series has been updated to include cell phones and iPods in an effort toward relevance.  I wonder if Margaret is still talking about using a belt with her sanitary napkins (who ever really called them that?!  That was a dated reference even when I read the book).  But the burgeoning sexuality of the characters in Judy Blume's books is what I really remember and think was so important back then.  Breasts, periods, wet dreams, erections, masturbation, actual intercourse and blow-jobs...all that she put out there for us to learn about before actually experiencing any of it.  It was some kind of awesome.

Okay.  I have to go.  Maya is itching to run to Target and GameStop: gift cards burning holes in her pockets!