It's Beginning to Look a Lot Like Christmas

After Thanksgiving...

I had a rough day, went to have some time to breathe in the cemetery, came home to this. I've never had Christmas lights on my *own* house before, my kids have never had a "Christmas house" before. This was a nice way to come home. Shad put up these lights, got all the kids to help clean up the house, and listed my keyboard on Craigslist and had a seller come over right after I got home.

And since our house was decorated on the outside, we needed to decorate it on the inside.

When your five-year-old proudly shows you how she can cut her own waffle, asks for a picture, and then right after the picture, the plate slides off the counter onto the floor. Hooray, maple syrup!

Katie is always saving empty Amazon boxes, cereal boxes, egg cartons, milk cartons, everything, and creating things with it. I don't remember if this was a car or an airplane.

{Katie & Samson}

Off to the library! It was an ERC day.

Shad surprised me with a date at home because he couldn't find a babysitter. He brought home Thai curry for us and Little Caesars for the kids to eat in the playroom while watching a movie. It was so nice to eat a quiet dinner at home and brainstorm our world bucket list...which is pretty much anywhere and everywhere and not really a bucket list, but a guideline list.

And then he decided to pose around on the stairs for me.

My sister Lori kinda spontaneously decided to move to Florida (okay, she'd been planning to go in January, but then winter hit and her skin freaked out and she made arrangements to get out). So I went up to Denver so my kids could spend time with her before she left and so I could help her pack. Which looked like this:

Bag after bag after bag of sweaters, skirts, camis, hoodies, leggings...I swear, I packed and vacuumed at least 10 Jumbo & Large bags of clothes. I can't access the original text I sent to Shad telling him my overwhelm.

See. Clothes are her thing. Not mine. 

And after helping her pack all of this (and this is after she got rid of several trash bags of clothes to the thrift store) and her 100 pairs of shoes (that is the actual count), I went home and continued to purge my already purged wardrobe because it still just felt like too much. 

And then my mom's neighbor came over to hang out with my girls and my heart stopped. She looks exactly how I remember Justine Sullivan from 6th grade. Justine agrees. So trippy.