***UPDATE***

Well I am home.....6 hours of sitting in a museum like house, 1 congealed re-heated pre-made Bob Evans turkey dinner, 2 Nati lights, 4 hours in the car with 3 whiny tired kids.....sigh. At least it is over...for 4 weeks until I have to do it again for Christmas. Gotta love the holidays.

The year the circus stole the last day of Thanksgiving break.

Ahhh the last day of a five day Thanksgiving break! A day to sleep in and lounge in your pj's all day. Pumpkin pie for breakfast and leftovers for lunch. Time to get a jump start on Christmas decorating......OOOPPPS HALT NOPE not this year. This year we have to pack up 3 kids and drive TWO hours to have Thanksgiving with Chris's relatives. Couldn't they have done it another day where we didn't have to worry about school and work tomorrow morning you ask?? Well my in-laws have this weird affinity for Circus's. They will drive 100's of miles to see small town circus's just because. They did that this year for the whole break except today. Never mind they only live 8 miles from us and could have had Thanksgiving at their house. Never mind they only see their grand kids maybe 4 or 5 times a YEAR. Seriously I think they identify with the sideshows. If that isn't' it I wonder what the reason for the obsession with the Circus could be???
I will have to update later after my long day ahead. Not only do we have to drive 4 hours round trip but we have to spend 6+ hours sitting in a showplace home with nothing at all for kids to do and if they touch things there will be hell to pay. A fun day ahead!

Ariel and the Christmas lights

Chris decided today would be a good day to put up the Christmas lights. This is interesting for two reasons. One, we have never put lights up outside in the six years we have lived here and two it is only ONE day after Thanksgiving and the so called magic of the season has not hit me yet. Chris went and dragged everything out and started working on creating a wonderland of lights.

Meanwhile the girls were watching the new Ariel movie. Amelia was inspired to dig out her Halloween costume which happened to be a mermaid outfit. She had me do her hair up and was way into character when she realized Chris was out working on the lights. She ran out to help him and totally refused to put a coat on. She threw a MAJOR mermaid fit. I said "Amelia it is cold out." She said "But mom I don't want to cover the beauty of the costume"...hmmm who can argue with that logic??

So the mermaid helped hang the lights in all her glory. Shivering and with blue lips but with a smile on her face.

Home for the Holidays: A bottle of Wild Vines raspberry Merlot (eerrrpp) and a can of SHUT THE HELL UP!!!!

Number crunching.

(( I got this idea from my favorite blog http://www.mycharmingkids.net/ ))



3- Number of times our dryer has broken in the past 6 years.


20 - The amount of minutes it took me to find 3 pairs of matching socks for the girls
today.


240- The number of months Chris and I have known each other.


170- The number of months we have been married.


4 - The amount of times Amelia watched her new Strawberry Shortcake
video so I could exercise and watch my soap opera uninterupted.


10- The number of times Caroline has asked me to take her to Planet Smoothie in
the last three months.


0- The number of times we have actually gone there :)


2- The number of Thanksgivings we have to attend in the next week.


1 - The number of Thanksgivings I WANT to attend.


3 - The number of bottles of wine I will drink to get through the one I don't want to go to.

Not ME Monday!

There is no way I ate 5 cookies (that had been knocked on the floor by the cat) yesterday just to get them out of my sight. I could never have woken up at 7:29 today and rolled out of bed when I should have been up at 7. I certainly didn't dig out my "vintage" aqua JLo velour pants because all my jeans were in the wash and probably wouldn't button anyhow. Nope not me!

I didn't nod my head and smile when someone was telling me something important this morning while thinking about something totally unimportant.

I didn't take out my purely decorative Christmas tea set and let Amelia and my two nephews use it to have a tea party with hot chocolate just so I could sit in front of the computer and order my Christmas cards. It would have been just plain silly to let them continue the tea party after the teapot began to leak out the bottom and the paint started to melt off.

My darling husband could never have promised he would only be traveling FOUR days the month of December only to change that to way more then FOUR days. NOPE that would NEVER in a trillion years happen!

A Thanksgiving thought

Sometimes it is hard to see how much we truly have. We have a warm house and food to eat. We have toys to play with (both kids and adults) and we have clothes to keep us dry and warm in the cold.
I got an email today that really made me think hard and appreciate every single thing that I have. The email was from an acquaintance who does some charity work and she quoted a child saying that they have gotten used to the cold because the one and only blanket that they have in their house keeps his little brother warm at night. This made me start to think about what life would be in a house that had one blanket. What life would be if MY children lived in that house. Which led to the thought that my children need to know there are kids just like them who live in those houses. I collected some blankets and am going to donate them but I need more then that to make the image of the child shivering at night to go away in my head. I just need to figure out what. I do know I am truly thankful this year. It has been a rough year for us in our own way but this definitely put everything into perspective.