"Case of the Mondays" is apparently a real thing.

Some days, you just need a pick-me-up, and Anne Taintor usually does the trick. In an effort to snap out of my current funk, I pulled this up this morning over decaf coffee. Unfortunately, it reminded me that there will be no "I need a drink" days for a long time.

To be accurate, I still have plenty of those days. Just not what I imagine would be a highly satisfying cocktail at the end of them.

I'm not even anti-Monday in the way that internet memes suggest most of the working world is, and I spend a lot of time working on the practice of gratitude. It's just today.

Our last weekend at home before holiday mayhem wasn't great. Seth and I have been at each other's throats for a week or so, and Finley (and therefore, I) was up all night last night with yet another round of daycare crud. I spent the hours between 0100 and 0500 googling "croup" while she coughed herself awake repeatedly. (It's not croup.) I'm getting more and more bummed at the thought of spending five days away from my baby in just over a week, a feeling made worse by the fact that she's going through a snuggly/ Mom phase. I have yet another weekend of watching everyone else party- this time while freezing my tail off at Army-Navy in Philadelphia- coming up while I sip mineral water. Work is an absolute nightmare through the holidays, as I am forced to skip workouts and lunchbreaks (not to mention forego leave) in preparation for "getting" to start the 4-month ILE course in January (which is definitely not my choice.) I'm already getting to and leaving my windowless office in the dark every day, and am buried in work and about to have to start bringing it home to finish in time. My faith in humanity has been depressingly, seriously eroded by stupid, tasteless, offensive, ill-informed, superior, and downright inhumane social media feeds in response to recent news events. The super-fun bone-and-joint-rearrangement phase of pregnancy has started early with this baby, leaving me feeling like I have a knife buried near my tailbone most of the time and seriously hindering any spirit-lifting cardio I can squeeze in. I destroyed the blender trying to cook while holding Finley this weekend, and have yet to order the wildly expensive new vacuum cleaner we desperately need so our floors will no longer be an actual biohazard. AND it's time to dig out the ugly sweaters and shop for white elephant gifts and unearth the sugar cookie recipe while I am in the mood for exactly zero of that.

Oh, and I finally got around to making Finley's "year in photos" collage, and it did NOT come out great.

Whew. Too bad I am not somebody who thinks "oh, well, it's OK to have a  bad day/ week/ month." I am somebody who thinks you need to pull it together. Still, when laughter turns out not to be the best medicine after all and scotch is off the table, sometimes the best one can do is to hope for a mercifully short Monday and a fresh start tomorrow. Fingers crossed.

In the meantime, the weekend did have bright spots. One of them was the bike ride we got in last night (just under the wire for "weekend fun") and this absolutely gorgeous sunset. (Not done justice by iphone photography, as per usual.)

And I finally made it to the craft store after weeks of its residence on my to-do list, and got all the art supplies we needed for handprint reindeer courtesy of a panicked phone call to Missy. We even managed to avoid painting the entire house brown (thanks for the reminder to get washable paint, Miss, even if I'm still not sure about the glue gun), although the final product probably falls into "pinterest fail" category.

AND, although we didn't make it to see the National Christmas tree, we took Finley to see the lights at the LDS temple. They were as spectacular as we remembered, and she was way more interested (obviously) than she had been last year, pointing at everything and especially digging the purple ones.

So here's to Tuesday and Christmas lights and things looking up. The photos of the week are some other much-needed rays of sunshine:

Finley LOVES books these days, and she holds up the one she wants you to read to her and clambers into your lap. It's basically the most adorable thing ever.

She was also a hilarious (and reasonably well-behaved) dinner date Saturday night, when I took her out for date night while Seth studied.

Oh, and there was this.

And (this is from last week, but still makes me smile) she loves brussels sprouts. Grabs them and stuffs them in her mouth. I feel like this is a major parenting win.