There's a song on country radio right now by Brad Paisley, called Letter to Me. The premise of the song is what the singer would say if he were able to send a letter back in time to his teenage self. I really do love the song, for two lines in particular.

Oh, you've got so much goin' for you, goin' right,
but I know, at seventeen, it's hard to see past Friday night.

Because I can remember those terrible times when the angst would rear up and swallow me whole, much to the dismay of everyone who had to deal with my drama.

and..

Have no fear, these are nowhere near the best years of your life.

Thank heavens for that!

And I got to thinking, how handy would that be, to have access to a time-spanning postal service? I'd be out of luck if it were a one-shot deal, though, because I've got a lot to tell myself.

After the FFA Banquet my Sophomore year: No, really, your friends are right. He's no good for you. But they're also wrong about who they think is good for you, so take their advice with a grain of salt. Especially when they're doing the whole "we like you--we hate you--oh wait, we like you again, for now" bit over the next year or so. That's mostly teenage girl, with a whole load of insecurity thrown in.

After a particularly tearful and dramatic fight with my dad, over a shirt I wanted to buy: He's right, you know. (And he usually is...) what you wear does send a message to others, try and make it a positive one. Oh, and throwing your hairbrush at the wall after you've stomped off to your room is just a little over the top dramatic.

Before leaving for college: Study. You're going to have to. So far, you've loafed your way through school with little to no effort on your part, and that's got to stop. You've got to hold yourself accountable, and go to bed, and go to those hideously boring 8 am classes, and put effort into everything, not just your music.

Of course, if I'm going to be realistic about this, I would have to say that I'd actually be a little hesitant to even warn myself of any of the mistakes I ended up making, because every little thing leads to everything else, and I'd hate to screw up what I've got going on now!

In addition, knowing me, I probably wouldn't have listened to some old bat sending snail mail via a temporal wormhole anyway!

So what I want to know is, if you could write a letter to yourself, in any time in the past, what would you write?

Because Murphy is too busy writing his law to dabble in parenting advice, you will never find a parenting book that warns you that for every unwashable item you discover in a pocket before you wash those pants, there will be one that makes it through the wash. When that unwashable item is, say, change, or a rock, or even a piece of paper, it's not that bad.

Crayons, however, are another story.

Especially red crayons.

This morning, eyeballs still scratchy from staying up late wrapping gifts, I slipped down to the basement to grab the children's clothes out of the dryer before waking them, so they would have something to wear to school, only to discover someone had slaughtered a pig in my dryer. The clothes were red, the dryer was red, even the lint was red. And there, wedged between the door and lint trap, was a suspicious red lump. A brief examination (which yes, included tasting--you know you're a mother when you nibble something you found in your dryer to determine how to treat the stains it left.) proved it to be crayon.

In the past, I have rescued our digital camera from a pocket, just as it was about to take a dip. When I calculated the replacement cost of what amounts to the children's entire wardrobe, I decided it would probably have been cheaper to have washed the camera.

Still, my good friend the internet proved to have a few solutions for me. So far, they've proved fairly helpful, although there are still some items of clothing that need to go through a second soaking, and possibly more drastic measures. All I'm going to say is that OxyClean and Magic Eraser are my friends. Those Magic Erasers are obviously made of pure magic.

This event, of course, set the tone for my entire day, a day that included a mystery stain on my sweater, a server crash that took a good hour out of my day, and a bent needle on my sewing machine.

But you know, someday, I'll just look back on all of this and laaauuughh......

....right about the time one of my children calls me for advice after they've just washed and dried a crayon.

A lit tree glows brightly in the corner, topped with a sparkling angel, and bedecked with ornaments of all sorts, from delicate painted porcelain balls to snowflakes and Christmas trees made by the hands of small children.

A tea kettle whistles merrily in a warm, sunny kitchen, as a mother keeps watch out the back window, waiting for snow-covered children to troop in for a cup of hot chocolate.

Neighbors call out hearty greetings to one another over the handles of snow shovels, the bright sunshine sparkling on the new fallen snow.

Is it the cover of the Saturday Evening Post?

No, it's my weekend, believe it or not! Saturday honestly couldn't have gotten much more Rockwellian, unless perhaps a horse-drawn sleigh had skimmed by as I scooped the front steps. We finally, finally got the Christmas tree up this weekend. After I shooed the children away long enough for me to secure the most fragile ornaments to the branches, I turned them loose with a pile of kid friendly ornaments, which they proceeded to fall upon like locusts. All in all, a pretty effective way to decorate the tree, if you don't mind all of your ornaments below eye level, and clumped six to a branch in places. Still, with Bing Crosby playing on the stereo as we festooned our evergreen, it was the kind of thing that makes your heart grow three sizes right there on the spot.

After the tree was up, the temperature finally warmed enough for the snow to be fun to play in, so I bundled the children up and sent them to the back yard, where they promptly proceeded to make sure that not one square inch of the new snow from the night before remained un-tromped-upon. I remember doing the same thing as a child, although, living in the country, I had a considerably larger "yard" to tromp. When they came in, cheeks and little noses red from the cold, I was waiting, just like my mother before me, with cups of hot chocolate........and a broom to whisk all the snow off their winter wraps before they were allowed in the house.

It really was a great weekend, and certainly a change of pace from the week before, preparing for the Cantata. Which, by the way, was spectacular! I am so, so proud of my choir, and it really took every last little shred of my willpower not to order large, special performance pieces of music for every single occasion on the church calendar. It inspires me so much to work with these folks. So many people came up to me that evening and said what a good job I did. I didn't do that much. The biggest thing I did was believe in them. They did the hard stuff.

This next week promises to be pretty hairy, as we move into full, red alert holiday mode, so I was glad to have a nice, heart-warming little episode in there somewhere.

So, according to the 24/7 Christmas radio station, and the music playing in pretty much any store I poke my nose into, it's the most wonderful time of the year.

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