Catching Up

It's 10:42 pm and I'm juiced up on dinnertime Diet Coke.  And I don't care!  I'm really tired of being so tired in the evenings, and because of my caffeine surge, I actually had a desire to go out after 7 pm (egads!) and do some Christmas shopping at Target.  I came home and designed and ordered our Christmas cards at snapfish.com (got 50% off thanks to Cyber Monday!).  Then I finalized and ordered the bulk of the boys' Christmas presents on Amazon.com (got Ben's desired Nerf gun at 50% off too!).  I'm feeling really accomplished... and it's not even December 1st yet.  It feels good to feel like myself, and not "fattyoldpregnant," which I fondly refer to myself as these days!!  :-)

We had a really nice Thanksgiving weekend.  We started on Tuesday afternoon and drove to Decatur, spent the night at Andrew's parents house, and continued the rest of the way to Chicago on Wednesday morning.  The boys had so much fun playing with their cousins Kaylie and Nathan.  We had a wonderful dinner on Thursday!  My sister Kristy gave us Kaylie's entire wardrobe for Hannah.  We came home with 9 garbage bags full of clothes for infant through 4T.  What a huge blessing!!!

On Friday we went to the Field Museum in Chicago.  The goal was to see dinosaur bones!  And since they have Sue the t-rex, along with a whole hall of dinos, the boys got their fill.  We chose to drive there, and because it was essentially a holiday day and my parents live right off I-55, the drive to the museum took us only 15 minutes.  We were tehre early enough to snag street parking and only had to pay the meter $6 to park.  It took much less time and was cheaper than taking public transportation.  We knew going into this visit that admission would cost us $50, and we were really hoping the boys would enjoy it enough to get our money's worth.  Thankfully they did!  They loved the dinosaurs, they loved all the taxidermy animals, they loved the pyramid, they loved pushing whatever buttons they could find, and they loved the children's PlayLab area.  We spent about 3 hours there and never had a sour moment.   All of the pictures from our visit can be found on my Facebook page.

 

So now we're home from Thanksgiving, mostly settled in (except for 9 garbage bags of little girl clothes forming a small mountain in our basement, ha!), and back in the swing of things.  Today was our first day of school in a week because we took the whole Thanksgiving week off.  I started pulling the Christmas decorations - I'm one of those who refuses to be Christmassy until AFTER Thanksgiving!  I want to have our Jesse tree up by Dec. 1 to start our daily Advent devotional (follow the link to read up about what we did with this last year).  I put some Christmassy books on reserve through the library, printed off some activities to do during school time, and made a list of the crafty things we can do that I've been finding on Pinterest.  It's nice to get into the Christmas season!

And now it's 11:13 and I'll probably regret this in the morning.  Oh well.  :-)