Only 11 days till Christmas!

Okay so I’m starting to sound a bit like my children with the countdown… but I’m very excited about Christmas this year. I think its b/c I really enjoy watching my kids open their treasures and getting really excited about what they have received. Maya did peek at one of her gifts already, it had a hole in the package then Nikolai jumped on it and so it opened the top of it and Maya was VERY excited. She than asked the rest of the evening if she could open it and she was told NO!!! Between the girls asking about their gifts and opening I’ll be glad when they do get to open their gifts. Next year there will be no putting of the gifts EARLY under the Christmas tree because I think that just spurs more asking…


Well Tim and Helen are slowly starting to remove their items from our house. It’s quite the process. Tim came this week to help pack and load another car load. I have a feeling that getting all of the items is going to take some time. But he is taking the clothes out of the closet so that will mean we can move our clothes to the closet, just not our dressers  The master bedroom upstairs the closets are much smaller than the one we have down stairs (which is pretty small) so we are only going to move some of our clothes upstairs and leave some of them downstairs… probably all of my summer clothing will remain down stairs and my dresses (since I don’t wear them very often). I will be really excited when we get to move our dressers inside and then we will be able to move the desk in from outside so I can have a place to do my make up every day. So that will be fun  Baby steps that’s all we go right now.

The kids have been hyped up all week. The beginning of the week both girls came home “sick” on Monday. I personally think they had the case of the Mondays. B/c neither of them acted very sick by the time they came home. But overall their behavior has been wild! It’s the holidays I’m sure but mercy me they are just wild sometimes. Maya has started playing with Nikolai a LOT more which is kind of fun that they are able to play with one another but the issue that I’m finding is Maya plays a lot rougher with Nikolai so he tends to get pushed down more so we are constantly reminding her that you have to be careful with him. Of course Nikolai just comes right back with the pushing or the head thump. He is a boy boy afterall.

So the weekend plans are to try to get the kids to see Santa. We are going to look in the “Get Out” section in the paper and hopefully we can catch him somewhere in the area. Hopefully it will be FREE b/c free is always better. I think we are planning on a date night, which will be a ton of fun! I love date nights. There is this restaurant that is just down the street from our house. It’s kind of a mix cuisine called “Twisted Cuisine” and there are all kinds of different things there. Like their will be Ostrich or Crab pumpkin soup, they mix flavors. It’s very good and different. We got there about once a quarter b/c the change the menu with every season, so you don’t get the same thing every time you go. We try to do local businesses around our little town b/c we get so warn out with the chain restaurants. We have found that if we “save” the local businesses for date night, it makes it more special for date nights and we take the kids to the chains. 

So this week we had a carry in by the supervisors in the division and one of the supervisors made these turtle treats that I’m going to make this weekend. They were so yummy. The recipe includes:

-pretzel

-Rollo

-Pecans

Take the Pretzel and put on a cookie sheet, put the Rollo on top, put in the oven at 350 for 4 minutes, once chocolate is starting to melt, take pecan and push down in the center of Rollo… that’s it… they are SOOOO YUMMY and EASY! So I’m going to have the kids help me make some… Maybe this will be my Christmas gift for my neighbors since I ate their turtles I brought for them last weekend 

I have to start getting stuff gathered for next weekend since it will be a Christmas weekend. I want to have some fun crafts for the kids to do. They love doing crafts and I think it will be fun. We normally do Christmas cookies. Last year I bought the rolled dough and I cut them into circles (yeah exciting right) they decorated them with icing and sprinkles. I would prefer NOT to do these kind of cookies only b/c they really aren’t my favorite. I am just trying to think of some kind of cookie that the kids can “decorate” or help make but not this particular kind of cookie, so if there are any ideas out there. I’m open.

So that’s life as we know it right now. Christmas shopping is complete and just getting ready for my holiday menus. I think we have decided we will not be heading anywhere for Christmas instead we will wait until after the holidays and travel than. I mean if we are not going to be there for Christmas just makes it another trip another time. Maybe we will mail the gifts that would be fun for them to get something in the mail. So we’ll figure something out.