Back when I was a gainfully employed magazine writer, I found it impossible to leave the job at the office. If I wasn't interviewing a source at 9 p.m., I was thinking about what he or she said and how it might fit into a story as I washed up for bed. In the shower, in my car on the way to the grocery store ... in the produce aisle at the grocery store.

I think they call this being "too wrapped up" in your work. I also think you don't realize that you're too wrapped up in your work until you, say, lose hours and hours of it when your computer crashes and you haven't hit the 'save' button. This is your queue to put your head on your desk and sob.

Well, it turns out, I'm STILL too wrapped up in my work -- the work of childhood. More specifically, the work of childhood from September to December, when the lazy days of summer give way to the practice of marking time by what sort of holiday decorations Target is displaying at its entrance. Some parents of preschoolers and up, this one included, spend a lot of time planning and preparing for the big three: Halloween, Thanksgiving and Christmas. If you're one of the lucky ones, everything goes off without a hitch: The costume is finished on time and fits; your pumpkin pie for the school feast turns out perfect; and not only do your kids not cry when they sit on Santa's lap at the mall ... they also smile for the picture.

Oh, that's living the dream.

But for us, the dream has really been about going a week without visiting the pediatrician. Or going a week without visiting the pediatrician twice. With each holiday that has arrived, so too has some sort of illness, which has become my own personal version of the computer crashing.

I spent more time than any normal person really should cutting small pieces of felt and finding the perfect red boots for MJ's Halloween costume, only to have a bad cold stomp through the door a week before and hang around just long enough to keep her from both school and a friend's costume parties.

November rolled around and so did croup, cancelling Randy's 40th birthday party, causing all four of us to miss the feast day at MJ's preschool and rendering that pumpkin cheesecake in the fridge pointless. Even our presence at the annual family Thanksgiving was questionable at best, beset as it was by drippy noses and suspicious coughs; but, we arrived anyway, feeling as though the lot of us were patched together by duct tape, Kleenex and glue.

What next? MJ's friend's birthday party? The Christmas parade? Yes, and yes. Little L, who threw a little bronchiolitis into the mix just for good measure, stayed home for the party. Everyone stayed home from the parade.

My sister called one day during the mess. I answered the phone miserably: "House of Pain, may I help you?" although what I was really thinking was "Can you help me?" She couldn't, of course; her kids were sick, too.

The good news is that Santa still makes house calls, so even the flu can't keep Christmas at bay. That left just one event to salvage this season: a trip to "Disney on Ice" at the RBC Center, in what would be MJ's first-ever live show of any kind that requires a Ticketmaster surcharge. I was absolutely determined we would not miss this one. It wasn't just the combined $66 in tickets we paid, or the fact that she would get to see two of her heroes, Lightning McQueen and Mater, in person. It was also that I needed something to go right. To go as planned. I needed something to actually happen, for once.

I was so superstitious that it might not, that some cold would sneak up on MJ at the last minute, that I kept her home from preschool two days before ... even though she only had a harmless cough. So superstitious that I wouldn't mention aloud that we were going. Even MJ didn't know what we had planned.

So Sunday came. We dropped Little L off with grandparents and headed to the show. She was suitably excited, and walking through the concourse, she wore a bright smile. We sat down in our seats, munched on $7 popcorn (!) from a Mickey and Minnie box and $6 barbecue sandwiches after paying $10 in parking, and waited for the entertainment to descend upon us in glorious, triumphant fashion. We had actually made it.

And then, the lights went off for dramatic effect. Mickey's car broke down and started smoking. Villains arrived from The Little Mermaid and The Lion King. And our MJ lost it.

"I'm scared! I'm scared!" she screamed through tears. "I'm very scared!" People turned and looked at us, and I felt as though we had taken our daughter to some secret torture fest on ice, that we were forcing her to sit through the most frightening experience of her life.

"I just want to go home! Can we please go home!"

We didn't make it through the intermission. Her favorite part? The box the popcorn came in, which she hugged like it was her last friend on earth. As we walked in the house, beaten down by Disney, all we could do was laugh. She would rather have stayed home.

MJ also wasn't bothered that she missed two-thirds of Halloween, part of Thanksgiving and the early days of Christmas. I, of course, was the only one who was peeved, the one whose computer kept crashing. She was happy at home with her Play-Doh and her macaroni necklaces and her little sister and her spontaneous fun. Lesson learned: You can't really treat motherhood like an office job, with plannable projects, dates that can be circled on a calendar, errands that can be marked off a list, because Murphy's Law secretly was written by a 3-year-old.

And I'd like to tell you I'll keep that lesson in mind when the October-November-December crush arrives again next year, but I can't. The only thing I can tell you is that there are 15 days left in 2008, and I'm not planning a thing.

Beth appears Tuesdays on TriangleMom2Mom. Read more about Beth at her blog MotherBunker.