Christmas "Fun"

This will likely be my last blog before Christmas, and I wouldn't be shocked if it were the last before the baby is born.  I had all this fun stuff planned for these weeks before the holidays - social events, shopping, neat crafts for Jack and I to do at home and of course blogging.  Yesterday, however, I realized as fun as all this stuff sounds, I don't have the energy to enjoy it all.  After "quiet time" yesterday (I can no longer even pretend it's nap time) we set out to make Oreo balls.  Jack was excited about it, and so was I.  I'm not a big fan of cooking, but I love to bake.  And Oreo balls only have three ingredients, so they're pretty simple.
We started at three o-clock with plenty of time before bath at five.  I began chopping Oreos in the blender.  That didn't work so well, so I transferred them to my small chopper, which ground the cookies with marginally better results.  Since the chopper is small, I had to do five or six different batches of chopping and dumping into a bowl.  Then, I tried to blend the cream cheese with the Oreo crumbs with the same blender that failed me the first time - no dice.  I chunked the blender into the sink and got out my heavy-duty KitchenAid mixer.  Why I didn't start with the mixer is beyond me.  I'm claiming pregnancy brain.  In doing so, however, I had a flash to the last time I made Oreo balls two years ago.  I had a sneaking suspicion I went through the same song and dance with multiple kitchen appliances then.  By the way, Jack really enjoyed "helping" throughout all this, since his main task was periodically sampling the Oreos, which he'd never had before yesterday.
So I finally got the Oreo crumbs thouroughly blended with the cream cheese - never thought mixing two ingredients could be so time consuming.
Now it was time to roll the entire bowl of dough into roughly one-inch diameter balls.  My back ached.  I sighed and dug in.  Jack helped make two more or less log-shaped "balls" before he lost interest and ran off to the play room.  It took me the better part of an hour to roll around 130 little Oreo balls.  I did transfer everything to the dining table halfway though in an attempt to save my back, but I'm not sure it helped much.  When I finally got all the balls done and into the fridge to chill and the kitchen cleaned up, it was 4:55 - five minutes til bath time.  I couldn't believe how long it had taken and how exhausted I felt.  After all, most of us don't consider baking an exercise of physical endurance.  And I still had to melt white chocolate for coating the balls, something I still haven't done, twenty-four hours later.  I spent that last five minutes before bath cuddling on the couch with Jack before I begrudgingly  dragged us upstairs to start the bath/dinner/bed routine.  I could have easily sat there on the couch for another hour or so, but with no nap these days, if we don't start bath at five o'clock and get Jack in bed by 7:30, bad things start to happen.
As a result of the Oreo ball experience and my subsequent exhaustion and crankiness, I've decided to cut a lot of unnecessary things off my "to do before Christmas" list.  I thought I'd rather enjoy our last holiday with only one child than make myself miserable cramming in all the "fun" stuff.  So if  I don't show up at your holiday gathering, get you a gift or even talk to you for the next several months, no offense intended.  I'm probably napping.