So last Sunday we were in tshirts and shorts, almost 70 outside and today we were freezing our tootsies off from our first snow of the season. Thanks Houston-we got all your snow! And lucky Allison and I got to march in it in a Christmas parade. We started off Saturday morning in a cold rainy downpour which quickly turned to ice and snow before we finished the parade. Thank goodness we were close to the front and only had about a 20 minute walk. But Allison and I were frozen solid along with the other chorus members. We were busy singing "Let it Snow, Let it Snow, Let it Snow" while freezing to death. It was a bit festive though! And we got to walk back and see the rest of the parade and wave to Santa and Mrs Claus in their horse drawn sleigh. It did put us in a festive mood, albeit cold. We usually have this parade in Nov. when it is much warmer-there were times we wore tshirts. Not this time. I had hoped Tom and Scott would join us-it really is a nice parade. But since it was so lousy outside they stayed home. And sadly missed Breakfast with Santo since I did not sign Scott up ahead of time, thinking he and Tom would be joining us for the parade.
The drive back home was pretty horrible. I did manage to stop into Target on the way home though since I was already out. It was actually nice since the store wasn't overly crowded. The roads were very slushy and slippery so not alot of people left their homes. Not too great for the economy though. Nice for me however-I had to put together goody bags for Scott's birthday party today. He had a swim party at "Splashdown", a local swimming pool with indoor water tube slides, a rope swing and diving board. He had never been although Allison has been many times with the girl scouts. (Me too). The kids all had a great time today, and I even took Scott and Allison and two friends in early for extra swimming before their party was scheduled. The price included his food(hot dogs, chips, soda) plus a cake(custom picture-Mario of course) and ice cream. So I did not have to clean anything or set up-just show up and man the table and pass out food and goody bags. Besides Scott's party, I had my Girl Scout Holiday party on Friday night. We spent the evening making holiday baked goods for the local psyche patients, swapped holiday gifts and after a quick taco dinner, spent the evening having dessert at a local fondue restaurant, "The Melting Pot". The girls decided we needed to start a new tradition. They really enjoyed dipping brownies, rice krispie treats, cheesecake, pound cake, marshmallows, bananas and strawberries into tubs of chocolate. Who wouldn't love that! Plus it all fit into their cooking badge!
I got to spend some mom time during the day though when I enjoyed a morning out for Mother's Tea with the school moms. The school puts on an outing for all the moms each year at a local restaurant owned by one of the school families. They have coffee, tea and pastries, and bagels along with fruit and my favorite door raffles(although I did not win this year). It is a nice time to chit chat with the school moms. I look forward to it every year-and it is always on my day off! Although it didn't leave me much time to get the house set up for the Friday night meeting and start decorating for Christmas. Tom has the outside lights up but now we are working on the inside.
Actually we enjoyed St Nick's Day this Sunday with a visit from St Nick and stockings full of ornaments, gingerbread cookies and two new artificial trees for Allison and Tom to hang their ornament collections. Tom has a Star Trek/Star Wars/outer space tree and Allison has a cat collection. I get the big tree for my rocking horses and glass Christmas bulbs. Scott gets the kids tree(a collection of kids ornaments including Rudolph, Snoopy, Harry Potter and any other character they enjoyed). We had planned on picking up our live tree this weekend, but it was a bit too nasty last night. A good weekend to stay in and study with the kids(and wrap Christmas ornaments) but I did manage to spend some time outside with Cookie in the snow(which she loved!). She was busy chasing Scott down the small hills while he sledded with our neighbor. I had to give her a bath afterwards though since she had big frozen snowballs on her feet and could barely walk.
I was glad Tom made it home before the big snow. He was down in Charlottesville VA all week so I was juggling both of the kids and their schedules on my own. I had to get Scott to gymnastics and Allison to piano at the same time which as interesting. It made for a lot of driving last week.
I also had my own GS Leader meeting/holiday party on Weds night and had the kids help me out by making a dessert plate for the event. I also had to drop off shoebox gifts that the girls made up for kids at a local shelter for the holidays. Naturally on that night it was pouring rain which made it difficult to keep all the wrapping paper dry. We are almost done with donations. The school always puts on a toy collection as well as work. And we have already had a coat drive at work. Everyone is fussing though that donations are down quite a bit this year. Guess everyone is busy paying off their own debts.
We also had an appraiser stop by today since Tom decided to refinance our house and take advantage of the low rates. We didn't change our monthly mortgage payment, but we did knock off 4 yrs of payments. We are still waiting on our roof guy to replace our skylight-guess he is busy! Too bad we didn't discover the leak in the summer!
So Happy St Nick's Day! (December 6th). I am off to put out a few more Christmas decorations! Kathleen and Family