The family picture over our fireplace is from Christmas of ’07… it’s a great pic (they even photoshopped my front tooth straight). But for two years every time I’ve looked at that picture, I’d get a little twinge of guilt… like I didn’t want to publicly admit I had another kid or something.

Christmas Eve, Jon’s entire family got together for photos. Here’s the one of our family:

Jachin wins the award for most authentically showcasing his true personality. Nonetheless, before blowing the thing up to life size and hanging it over the fireplace, we may look into a head-swap.

The day after Christmas, I left to spend three days alone in Vegas, writing like a crazy person. There was a lot of room service (I’ll be honest, there was cheesecake at 1am). But yesterday was the deadline — the end of the road. Pond of Pretties had to be postmarked no later than the 31st to be submitted to the Delacorte Press contest…

And everything that could have gone wrong, book wise, yesterday… did go wrong. I lost 50 pages of rewrites somewhere… gone. Still gone, still lost… still driving me nuts trying to figure out where they could be. My printer jammed, about a bazillion times. I called it all kinds of mean names that made my kids’ ears smoke. I accused it of having no legal father… which I’m sure is true of every printer ever made, but still — not nice of me to point out. When a second printer was called into action, and I had to drive several miles away to get to it, I realized that the gas light in my car has been on for about 86 days (that may be a slight exaggeration), and feared I’d run out of gas on the way to the post office. Keep in mind: New Year’s Eve, about 15 minutes before the post office closed.

Gah!

But the writing gods were smiling down, friends…

signed, sealed, delivered. well, not actually delivered yet… but I did splurge for the delivery confirmation.

Wish me luck, guys.