It's beginning to look a lot like Christmas!

As of Monday night, we're officially done with Christmas shopping & wrapping!  What a relief.

I do 95% of my shopping online since I loath crowds & shopping in general.  But, each year around Christmas, Mike & I take a day off to get the last minute, random items I'm not able to get online.  After we finished Monday, we celebrated over a couple of delish margaritas.  It's a fun way to be productive & to actually get some time together alone while the kids are at school.  I look forward to it each year.

I picked up some pre-made gingerbread houses at Walmart for the kids to work on while we watched the Bears game Sunday.  I must be honest, they did a pretty pitiful job, randomly sticking a few gummies on each house, here & there. 

Since I like to display them on our fridge, I put a little elbow grease into them & finished them myself.

I keep this little tree in our living room as a way to separate our gifts from my immediate family's gifts.  We host Christmas Eve each year & exchange gifts between the grand kids, nieces, aunts, uncles & Grandma & Grandpa.  My own family of four wait until Christmas morning to do gifts & a couple of years ago, I kept our gifts under the main tree & they were a huge mishmosh mix up when my family arrived Christmas Eve.  This little tree keeps them nicely divided.

I decorated this plant with festive ball lights & ornaments & every time I pass it on my way to our bedroom, it makes me happy.

Our family room makes me the happiest though; it's so full of lights!  At night when the kids go to bed & the house is quiet, I love just sitting & enjoying it.  I'm going to miss all these lights when Christmas is over!  Hard to believe that Christmas Eve is a little more than one short week away.

I assembled teachers gifts on my day off today.  I made a German chocolate cookie recipe from the Food Network & my super easy, standard pretzel turtle.  Nothing like a dessert that takes under 10 minutes from start to finish (other than unwrapping each Rollo).  Click here for the cookie recipe & here for the turtle recipe.

This fat little ba**ard of a cat thinks his lounging area is our kitchen table.  I may call him names, but I do love him so!  Random story, but in the thirteen years of owning pets, we were struck with fleas.  When I first saw the dogs scratching, I joked about it while my sister was over, thinking it was nothing.  Lauren said that if it was fleas, it would be awful since she dealt with them, but I totally blew her off, thinking she was exaggerating.  Wrong.  It was AWFUL.  Luckily I vacuum & do laundry constantly, so they never got to be a problem around the house, just on the pets.  Casper (the cat above) licked himself so much that he ended up having a raw backside & losing a ton of weight.  No topical flea treatments helped, but luckily the vet prescribed each pet a pill that killed every flea within four hours.  GOOD RIDDANCE!!! 

Anyway!  We have one more weekend before Christmas & the big day will be here!  The weather will finally, finally be cooler this weekend; it's been hot, humid & quite yucky here in Florida.  I hope to fill the weekend with outdoor activities during the day & Christmas light exploring at night.  My number one favorite day in the whole year is December 24th.  It's the most wonderful time of the year!!!!

Sick little princess

Yesterday was my usual Wednesday off & since the weather has been so nice, Reese & I walked Cameron to school.  We had a great morning & Reese was happy as could be.  When we got back home, I told her I had some wrapping & cleaning to do so I put a movie on for her upstairs in our bonus room (which Mike wants to call our rumpus room!)  I periodically checked on her & I noticed she was very often covered up & on the couch but still not complaining of anything.  When she didn't eat the lunch she normally scoffs, I felt her head & she was burning up.

 

The first swipe of the thermometer showed 103.6 degrees; poor girl!  I gave her Motrin & laid with her & within a half hour she was a sweaty mess with a normal temp.



She seemed better as we took the short drive to pick Cam up after school & by the time we were driving home, she was crying that she was tired.  I got her cozy with a movie & she fell asleep until we were just sitting down to dinner.  That's when she woke up crying & as I comforted her, she puked ALL OVER!!  It was a hot mess & the poor girl was in hysterics.  After we both cleaned up, I put her to bed with me & she thankfully slept through the night with no more pukes!!  It's amazing how quickly one can go from feeling well to feeling like garbage.  But, I'm home from work today to nurse my sweet girl back to good health!  On top of Reese being sick yesterday, Cam came home with a swollen lip, all gashed up inside from a classmate punching his water bottle as he drank from it.  This is two days in a row of an injury from the same little a**hole kid (Monday he kicked Cam in the face!!!)  so I was not a happy camper.  On top of it, he had been sent to the clinic at school to treat his lip & no one had the decency of notifying me!  I emailed his teacher as soon as I got home; poor communication makes me crazy!

As much as it stinks that Reese is sick, I'm so glad it's this week & not Christmas!  What a bummer that would be.  I'm praying this bug gets out of our house before then.  Speaking of our house, it's all decked out this year since we put colorful lights around our family room (oddly enough, I got the idea from the movie Home).

Reese was having a fun week before she got sick..  She made a snowman made out of a tube sock & rice at school.



And she went to a princess birthday party for her friend, Sophie.  She loved getting her makeup, hair & nails done; right up her alley!

Reese is 100% girl & loved being pampered & showing off her stuff on the runway.  It was so stinking cute & I think I smiled the entire hour & a half we were there!

I couldn't resist sharing this monstrosity of a picture from a recent "Awkward Christmas Party" we went to.  I picked up these gorgeous sweaters from Target & Mike decided it would be perfect to go without a shirt under the sweater vest.  Of course, it looked like he had a sweater on since he's such a hairy beast!  It was quite hilarious.

Recent happenings

Well, it's officially December & the holidays are in full swing around here!  Thanksgiving came & went in a hurry, but we had a great time spent with family & plenty of food.  Before we even got to Thanksgiving, we celebrated Reese's birthday.

Since Reese & her BFF Sammy are only a day apart in age, it was an easy decision to have a birthday party together.  Everyone had a blast at Chuck E. Cheese & the best part?  There was no clean up before or after the party!

Now that Thanksgiving is behind me, I'm trying to get as much done in preparation for Christmas so I can actually enjoy the holidays with my sanity somewhat intact.  I have to say that I tend to be a very high strung, anxious person naturally, but at the holidays that tends to increase.  With longer hours at work & Mike traveling more, I'm basically in survival mode during the week.  There are definitely not enough hours in the day.

There's so much pressure as a parent & of course, at the  holidays, you want things to be perfect for your kids.  Generally, I think the pressure is even higher for moms since we set our expectations so high & are less forgiving of ourselves.  I always joke that I'd love to borrow Mike's brain for even just a day since it's such a peaceful place.  He jokes back saying that he would absolutely not want to borrow my brain for a day since it's such a hectic, chaotic place.

Thanks to Amazon Prime, I'm already more than halfway through my shopping.  Mike's office is piled high with unopened, brown boxes that have been delivered throughout the weeks.  Next chore is to start tackling the wrapping so we're not up until the wee hours of the morning just before Christmas!

Rambling aside, I'm so thankful that Christmas is upon is; my favorite time of the year!!

Our house is looking super festive...

And our sweet little elf, Fella is back in town, yay!!   Happy Christmas!