Is it over yet?

I am not sure how I am going to make it through the holidays in one piece. It's only 2 days past Thanksgiving and I've already broken down in tears once. I moped around the house all day today. I am usually excited to go shopping and put up decorations, but now I am approaching it as a task to get done. Everything related to Christmas feels like a chore. We were at the mall and I found some nice men's sweaters and figured, "hey, let's buy one for each male on our list." I didn't care so much whether they would like them, but just to check off those names. I put up the outside lights today because the weather was nice and it had to get done. I don't even want to open the rest of the boxes with our inside decorations.

Remind me again how many days I have left until this can all be over?

Shopping

After re-reading my last post, I thought it was pretty ironic that rather than wake up at 4am to go shopping, the first thing I did this morning was get an ultrasound. It's like my own little early bird special. There are a couple of follies on the left side that are growing, and a few on the right that are not quite big enough to measure. So this is a bit different for me to have the left outperforming for the first time. I am sticking with my current dosage and going back on Monday morning.

The hubby and I did spend afternoon in the mall. We did get a lot of our shopping done, but are now really missing the outlet mall near us that closed due to the flood last spring. It's not looking like it will ever come back, and the mall we went to today just wasn't as nice.

Christmas Decorations

I was thinking more about my blessing yesterday and the comments we had afterwards. While in some ways I didn't like them just because I don't like talking about this with people in person, thinking about it, I take it as a very good sign and indication of our community in church. Catholic churches are not exactly known for their community; people there don't rush up to newcomers like they do in other churches I've visited. But in the past year or so we made a real effort to get more involved and be real members of the community. So the fact that we did have so many comments is an indication of our success in that area. I would probably feel worse about it if I remained anonymous and no one said anything.

Other news this weekend is that we decorated our house for Christmas. The picture of the front of the house doesn't look as nice on camera as in real life. But we think we are definitely the best on the block (which is not saying much on our block). One neighbor did kick it up a notch this year, though.



Here is a close-up of part of our front porch with our Rudolph cut-out. The funny part is that Rudolph is held in place by a wrench set b/c he tends to fall over in heavy wind and it was the heaviest, yet shortest thing we could put out there.



And here is our tree.