No time to blog

Well I have been extremely busy as has everyone else in this world. I have mostly been busy getting ready to go to Tennessee for D's Ph.D Hooding ceremony. It will be fun and memorable. We are not taking the children since we are staying at our old house which does not have any furniture. Plus the kids still have school and hauling three kids down there and having them sit during a serious ceremony would not be very much fun for myself or for them. So D's mom is coming to watch the kids. We are very thankful that she is willing to do this and enjoys spending alone time with them. She will have fun. So since we are spending the night in our abandoned house I will be bringing all the supplies to sleep/shower/eat and do a few chores in the house. Additionally I have to clean my house for D's mom to stay in. So I have spending all my free time this week cleaning and getting little bits of chores done so that I am not having a breakdown today. So things are running smoothly. I have pretty much all the things packed besides my clothes and toiletries.

It should be a great weekend. I am attending a Hanukkah party full of latkes and dreidel spinning. This party is with all my former book club/co-workers so it will be a good time to catch up with everyone. D will be playing poker with his Tennessee buddies so it will be nice to catch up with his friends also. Friday is the hooding ceremony and then we are going to our favorite Tennessee restaurant, Pasta Trio. We always look forward to eating there. Saturday we will be heading home and will be looking forward to seeing our kids. We still have to get our Christmas tree and decorate so we will be spending the weekend at home doing all that stuff.

I have also been trying to fit in making homemade presents for my nieces and friends kids so that has also taken up a lot of my time. I am hoping that after this weekend things will settle down. But I also have more Christmas shopping and then my mom will be in town the next weekend so it will probably not slow down until after the holidays.

Last Sunday we went to see Santa at our local park. The civic association hosts a visit Santa event where you do crafts and games then you go on a carriage ride to see Santa. Santa was very friendly and knew a lot about the girls like what their dogs names were, what Julianne's teachers name was and even what their names were. So the kids were very shocked and had a great experience. Nathan was not too happy with Santa and refused to sit on his lap but I kind of expected it. It was a fun night and we will definitely do it again. The girls also decorated ginger bread houses with their cousin and Grandma. It was really fun. The houses were already constructed and all the kids had to do was decorate them with a ton of different candy/pretzels and cereal. I had a lot of fun and really wanted to decorate one of my own but settled on decorating different sides of the girls.





Last week Mallory slammed her dresser door into Nathan's face and he got a cut and then developed a small black eye. He was hamming it up in these pictures so the pictures were pretty cute and you can kind of tell he has a black eye.



Last Friday Julianne shared her book she created at her class's show-n-tell. She created a hard bound book the past week weeks called "The cats". It is basically about a cat who does not have friends and then finds some friends at school. It is probalby about 20 pages long and she wrote all the words and colored all the pictures. She put a lot of effort into the book and has a lot of pride in it. It was very cute and I will keep it forever.

Things I am grateful/thankful for:
-sharing experiences with my children
-seeing Julianne's expression when Santa knew important facts about her
-seeing the joy that Julianne has when she writes and completes things