Miscommunication

It is in the air. I'm not sure if it is just me or the universe as a whole. Is anyone else experiencing a lot of miscommunication lately? It isn't big things...but it seems to be a lot of miscommunication..by a smidge. Does that make sense? A lot of situations where I thought things had been talked about & settled or decided and the other person thought they had been brought up but no decision made, or I didn't get back to them,etc. It has happened enough lately that it really has me wondering what in the heck is up. Ugh.

Moving on to other stuff....we've taken the trees down. One of the cats kept knocking one of the trees over and after a broken ornament or two we decided enough was enough. We also didn't get into the whole decoration thing this year anyway, so it was easy to say "time to pack it all away". We are working on finding places for all the gifts, getting new clothes washed, etc. Eating leftovers is something else that we've been doing a lot of the past few days...and I think we are close to being done. Not that the leftovers are all gone yet but that we are physically DONE with eating them. LOL! Not sure we can eat much more of them without being done with them for life. ;-)

It seems like it has been forever since we've gotten together with friends. The new homeschooling group that we are members of hasn't gotten together since Halloween. :-( We miss those friends. It seems like everyone has been sick and then the holidays hit...bam. I hope we can start seeing them soon in the new year. Bowling starts back up in January. Our book club should be starting back up then too but I'm not sure the kids and I are into it anymore. I may let that go for a while. We will also be meeting again with the Shakespeare Club. Starting in February there will be some bowling tournaments that I know Morgan will want to participate in and maybe Alex too. Then dance will start gearing up for recital. So I don't want to overload our plates.

I have been feeling like I'm not getting stuff accomplished that I want and need to get done. I am going to be working on that.

Enough whining and complaining.

Christmas Day 2008

Early to bed, up many times in the night and early to rise. Is that how it goes? Well, that is how it was here at the Larabie house on Christmas Eve. Mama had a rough night due to a sore throat that kept waking her up, plus the puppy barking at 4am...because a certain 7yo little boy was wandering the house to see if Santa had come yet...and then up before 7am with a 10yo little girl that was excited about Christmas. :-) Everyone was up by 7:30am so we let the kids go down into the family room to see if Santa had left anything. We heard some squeals that he had definitely made a delivery at our house and so we took our caffeine of choice down with us and let the unwrapping chaos begin. Santa did good this year. Both kids got what they asked for. Alex received the EyeClops BioniCam , which is basically a portable, digital microscope and Morgan received a kit for doing the encaustic (melted beeswax) painting. It includes a low-temp iron (which can be used a variety of ways), a pack of 16 colored beeswax sticks, and then a pack of 100 4x6 cards to paint on. Both kids were beyond excited! We enjoyed a few minutes of happy squeals, claps & laughs. Then they started in on the other gifts. They received plenty of books and games of all kinds. We were finished before 9am and then enjoyed some cinnamon rolls and orange danish for breakfast. We had time to relax before getting on the road and heading east to Uncle Jon's & Aunt Jody's house for more celebrating. We were surrounded by family that we hadn't seen in a year or more. It was great! The kids had grandparents, aunts & uncles, and cousins all around them...and loved every minute of it. My MIL and 2 SILs have decided we need a ladies day out together. I had decided that it would be a great idea to do some family pictures since we would have grandparents, all the TN adult children and all the TN grandchildren together at one time. My brother let me borrow his tripod to help. The other family members thought it was a great idea so after food & gift exchanges we started with pictures. We got some really good pictures! I'm planning on getting a lot of prints. We had to drag ourselves away even though we were having such a good time. I was wiped out (not sleeping, feeling like ick) and we had to get home to the pups.

I have to say that this has turned out to be a wonderful, family-filled Christmas. We've enjoyed our celebrations with both sides of the family (and this is only 2 of the 4 parts lol). We are truly blessed.

Now to find a place for everything since it looks like Christmas exploded in our house a few times over. ;-)

Christmas Eve 2008

Holiday celebration #1 has been a success. :-) We celebrated with GC, Michael, and Aunt Ilene (Kelly's aunt) over at GC's house. We had a delicious dinner, stockings and plenty of gifts. Everyone had a nice time, including Kelly who has a throat infection. We brought home stockings for Trey & Bella, which they loved!

Michael took pictures of everyone in front of the tree so I will share some once I get copies from him.

The Larabie house is all quiet, except for iTunes playing on Kelly's laptop, and ready for Santa to arrive. Cookies & milk have been set out and all other gifts are wrapped and under the tree. After opening gifts here in the morning we will journey to Tullahoma, about an hour east of us. We will celebrate with Grandma & Papa (Corey's mom & stepdad), TJ & Laurie and their 3 boys, Ryan, Marcus and Matthew, and Johnathon & Jody and their 2 kids, Patrick & Arika. There will be tons of food and more gifts. This will be our first Christmas with Grandma & Papa since Christmas 2001! We are all excited about spending it with them again. To make it even better, they will be here for 3-4 months. :-)

Merry Christmas to all our family & friends.

How are the holidays here already??

I am NOT ready for the holidays and yet they are already upon us. Yule, the Winter Solstice, was yesterday. This is the first day of Winter. Our weather was cold and was even colder yesterday. Christmas is just 3 days away and we start celebrating Wednesday night so we have to be ready a smidge early...and I don't feel close to being ready at all. We got the baking done...thanks to Corey and the kids doing it. We have almost all the cookie platters delivered...just have the ones for the police & firefighters left to deliver. No gifts are wrapped. And some of the gifts aren't finished! I'm still sewing them.

It seems that life is trying to "get in the way" of holiday preparations. We attended the HP Club Yule Ball on Saturday night with the kids. Late that night Bella started getting sick...very sick...lots of vomiting & diarrhea....sooo not good no matter what but worse (I swear) when you have light berber carpet. Have I mentioned how much I *hate* berber carpet?? It sucks...it is like a sponge! Well, now we are ready to rip it all out! Ugh. Anyway, we couldn't figure out what was making her sick, on call vet said to watch her & call if she became lethargic or got worse. Well, she didn't get worse and eventually on Sunday started getting better. Thank Goddess because we were worried about her. She's one of our babies and no one likes it when their babies are sick. :-/ Later on Sunday we found a plastic container all torn up behind the recliner. We were confused because we didn't think we had any extras (these are the containers that we packed cookies & fudge in for family & friends). Well, this morning as we were getting ready to deliver some cookies to friends it hit Corey WHAT made Bella sick... cookies & fudge!! A whole container of it...slated to be delivered to friends! Hello...the sugar...the *chocolate*! No wonder she was sick. We checked with the vet to see if there was anything else we needed to watch for but he said as long as her tummy was better than it was out of her system. Ugh!! If that container had been full of fudge we could have come home to a dead or gravely ill pup. :-( Sooo...we crated her today when we did errands...but she got out! It was the travel, pop-up crate but still. Stinker.

Christmas Eve we celebrate with my mom, brother & aunt. On Christmas Day we will open gifts at home and then head an hour east to one of Corey's brother's house and spend the rest of the day with his family. His mom and stepdad are down for the holidays plus a couple months. We are looking forward to some quality family time with them.

That time of year....

BUSY! :-) Yep, you can tell it is December...we get busy, busy. But it is honestly fun. Corey has been busy baking holiday cookies & goodies. He has made several batches of fudge (chocolate, chocolate with pecans, and peanut butter) and cookies (peanut butter blossoms, m&m, and snickerdoodles). I tell ya...there isn't much left for me to make. ;-) He has had help in the kitchen from Morgan and Alex. They've had a good time.

We still have to finish processing all that pumpkin! We still have 4 small/medium pumpkins and then Alex's Great Pumpkin! So we will be working on finishing that up. I also want to make some orange chocolate creams (special request from my mom) and some dipped candy canes. I'm not sure what else will be holiday stuff but we do plan on doing some pumpkin goodies...bread, muffins, and even ice cream. Corey had some FABULOUS pumpkin ice cream last night...it was like pumpkin pie but in ice cream form! Ohmigosh it was delish.

This week we are pretty busy. On top of school (and work for Corey) we are taking my mom up to Nashville for her post-op checkup (her surgery went well), going to the cool used bookstore to trade in some books for store credit & look for more, go out to lunch for my birthday, do Morgan's 2 days of dance, go on a field trip to the performing arts center to see Amahl and the Night Visitors (a Christmas children's opera), go to Corey's work holiday lunch (no kiddos) at a nice steak house, and then I start volunteering at the Scholastic Warehouse up in Nashville like I did last year. In case you didn't notice...that is 4 days out of 5 driving up into Nashville. Ack! That is a lot of driving.

I am also getting serious about buckling down on the gifts I'm making. I don't want to say much, in case the recipients are reading this. But just know that I'm getting ready to start & it shouldn't take too long. :-)

Oooh...not sure if I ever mentioned here (didn't check previous posts before I started this one) but the puppy's name was changed within the first day or two...his name is Trey (for the 3 colors) and he is a sweetheart. His first round of antibiotics didn't resolve his runny, stuffy nose & cough so he's on his 2nd antibiotic and it does seem to be better already. Hopefully this will make him all better.

Grandma Gloria and Papa Tom (Corey's mom and stepdad) will be coming down to TN a little earlier than we thought. Yeah! They will be coming down on Monday, Dec 15th (instead of Friday, Dec 19th). We can't wait to see them. It has just been too long.