Hi Ho, Hi Ho............

*****Yep, I wrote this a couple weeks ago and never posted it. What a great representation of my life right now! Well, I'm about to post about Thanksgiving, so I figured I'd better finish this and get it up here. Thanks for your patience. :)

Ya, I realize I don't officially "work", but I feel like it this week. I'm not one to get very stressed around the holidays. I'm serious, I don't! I love the flurry of activity and the family visits involved. However, in complete honesty here, I realized Sunday morning, as I was leisurely sipping my coffee that I had been miscalculating that I had 2 weeks left till family got here. As this hit me like a brick, I gingerly walked over to my calendar and hoped my eyes wouldn't see what my brain just figured out. Yep. Sure enough, it was one week exactly till the inlaws came (7 family members). Oh crap.

So that whole bit about not being stressed during the holidays went flying out the window. Not only am I hosting Thanksgiving for 11 of us (and yes, 7 houseguests for a week), but we're also celebrating our Christmas together which means presents need to be bought and wrapped. Now, because I'm so on top of it, I had already bought most of the presents. :) But the whole idea of grocery shopping, planning and cleaning the WHOLE HOUSE in one week was a bit much. Plus, Noah has all these preschooly activities this week (including being STAR of the week!) and it's also the last week of our women's Bible study at church that I'm helping lead a small group. Throw into this pot the fact that Brian and I decided to join this crazy training program called CrossFit and you have a bunch of stuff piled on top of me. Lord, help!

All of these things are good things. Blessings! And for that reason sometimes I want to just say, oh well, what will be, will be. Do you ever do that? But ultimately, I want this to be a fantastic Thanksgiving and I want our home and company to be a blessing to all of this family. It'll be a lot of fun---assuming we stay healthy. I know every mom out there is praying for good health this holiday season. Am I the only one that feels like EVERYONE is sick all around me??? What a weird fall/winter this is turning out to be.

However, one of the brightest spots is that I was able to get away with my very best friend, Emily, a couple weekends ago. We soaked up all the goodness Boulder, CO had to offer and boy was it awesome. I keep thinking it had to be a dream, because it came and went so quickly. She is preparing for her 3rd child, so it was probably an even sweeter respite for her. The weekend can be summed up with three words: talking and eating. With the exception of sleep, we did not stop talking from the moment we greeted at the airport till we parted ways at the airport to return home. A funny thing about sleep---while we took naps both days, we kept waking up REALLY early and agreed we got less sleep for sure than if we had been at home. But it was worth it. Here are some pics of our weekend: (we only got one picture of ourselves together!!)