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I know, I know – it’s mid-January and I’m talking about gifts from three weeks ago. But as you’ve probably noticed, I’ve been a bit, well, absent these past couple weeks – partly taking family time, and partly dealing with household sickness and me being simply too tired or preoccupied to write about said household illness.

So I’ve still got a few things to say about the holidays. And if it makes you feel any better, it’s not just cyber-world where I’m slacking: I still haven’t put my Christmas decorations away.

Baby steps.

Maddie and Cora are in quite the feisty stage right now, and I’m dangerously close to opening up a can of whoop-ass on both of them sometimes.

I do not, do NOT understand why they are so mean to each other, yet so different with their friends. What is this natural antagonism, this inbred animosity?

I fret that I have instilled some sort of insecurity in each girl: that each is mean to her sister out of some fear of being less-well-loved by Mommy. I worry that I have made each girl feel not as good as her sister. Or even that I walk around trashing my own family members, setting a bad example.

We’re all still reeling from the Connecticut tragedy, I know. And I have nothing new to say – and nothing that hasn’t been said better, by smarter people – on the subject. We live in a fallen world, and as one local official remarked on Friday, evil did indeed visit that town.

If you’re like me, you’re walking around on a knife edge, one sappy Christmas commercial away from sobbing uncontrollably. I know my children are tired of being squeezed relentlessly, snuggled unashamedly, clutched ridiculously tightly. I am unwilling to let them out of my sight, reluctant to stand even a few feet away in a room of strangers. School today will be a strange thing indeed.

Brian and I wrestled Friday evening with whether or not we should tell the girls what had happened: on the one hand, they have little to no exposure to the news or social media, and with Maddie’s tendency to worry about EVERYTHING we could see her getting incredibly wound up about this if we told her. On the other hand, if we kept this from them and they heard about it at school – we didn’t even want to think about the state they’d be in by pick-up time.

So we decided to tell them.