The holiday season is upon us!

Last week was extremely busy for our household. We decided on Sunday we would make the long drive north for Thanksgiving after all. We had originally been planning on staying home and keeping it low key, just the three of us. So I spent every spare moment I had getting my work done so we'd be able to leave on Thursday (hence, no blogging). And once we were in the north country, every minute is always filled.

I snuck in a hair appointment on Friday and scheduled another for the Saturday after Christmas, in hopes of being able to squeeze one last cut in before April (our next expected trip north after Christmas).

I put out three of my Mom's five (six? seven? eight?) bins of Holiday decorations. She enjoys doing it, but I'm a bit psychotic about it and LOVE doing it. So I left her the tree stuff and did everything else. ha ha

I also got to visit with all of my grandparents a little, albeit quickly. I hadn't seen my Dad's parents since the 25th Anniversary party I threw in August for my parents and 2 sets of aunts and uncles. Unfortunately, with Monkey's nap, our timing was awful because they were leaving for church. But 15 minutes was better than none at all. Hopefully we'll have time to stop in again on our short Christmas trip.

I hope everyone had a wonderful Thanksgiving. We celebrated with T's family Saturday night at his parents house. My mother-in-law hosts Thanksgiving every year. Monkey enjoyed playing with all of her little cousins (and T's aunts and uncles were loving have all sorts of little kids running around again now that T and his cousins are all adults).

We arrived back home yesterday. Our brother-in-law was nice enough to run out to our house for us to turn up the furnace to warm the house before we got home. We keep our thermostat for the oil tank at 55 degrees. BRRRR. Instead of the layers we normally wear when we arrive home, our house was nice and toasty.

T brought up my Christmas and Winter bins yesterday. I only have three, but they're packed extremely full. I did get one put out last night. Monkey and I will hopefully get another finished today. She and I will take a ride out to a tree farm a few miles from our house later this week to pick up a plain wreath for our front door. And next Sunday, we'll take a family trip to a tree farm to cut our tree. We're having our annual Christmas party this Saturday. I feel a little odd not having our tree for it, but the longer we wait to get it, the better. I know I'll be picking it up off the floor a few times with Monkey this year. There is not a doubt in my mind that she'll pull the whole thing down. No breakable decorations for me this year (I need to find another way to display the beautiful hand made Santa heads a friend gave me - made by her Dad).

We'll also have to get outdoors later this week to make the outside of our house festive, too. I'm in need of greenery this year. I've always managed to use clippings from a tree that had fallen, but we've had no tree mishaps this year. I don't like cutting from live trees for my decorating.

I'll be taking lots of pictures later. When I say psychotic, I do mean it. I put little touches in every room of our house.

On that note, Monkey is playing with the bead strings. I think she's ready to put some more decorations out. It's time to light my Christmas scented candle, find some Christmas music on the radio and teach my daughter how to be psychotic about the season, too!

Dancing in the living room is required, of course (though that is normal on a regular basis in our house).