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.