So I spent my Holiday week at home with my shingles taking lots of medicine 5 times a day. I was supposed to be resting according to my doctor and I never got a chance. Instead I spent the whole time cooking and cleaning(and Christmas shopping!).

Even though we did not end up hosting Thanksgiving dinner as planned, we still ended up cooking quite a bit of food to take our neighbor's house for dinner. We had planned on having our next door neighbors who hosted Turkey Day dinner last year. We figured we owed them. Instead they ended up traveling to Ohio to visit family. So at least I did not have to do massive house cleaning. But I managed to get that in as well. Since we were home and the weather was gorgeous over the Thanksgiving weekend(temps hit the 70s), we spent a lot of time outside. I was busy putting away FAll decorations, Halloween decorations and raking tons of leaves. I even recruited SCott to fill the wheelbarrow and dump the leaves for me. I thought I would get a jump on spring cleaning. Then Tom spent the weekend putting up lots of great Christmas lights. I also spent quite a bit of time cleaning out the closets and dropping off kids clothes to the resale shop. It is a very busy place there at this time of year with the holidays just around the corner, so it is a good time to sell outgrown clothes, shoes and toys. I also needed to pick up a few items for Scott since he was the one that did most of the outgrowing this year!

I also spent quite a bit of time at the grocery store picking up supplies. We had dinner with neighbors that recently moved back to our area and a few friends of theirs. We ended up supplying the turkey, stuffing, crab dip appetizer and cranberry sauce(made from scratch). And since we love the leftovers so much, I ended up making double recipes so we could enjoy our own Seitz casserole(turkey and sausage stuffing mixed with gravy(Yum). So I had a lot of different grocery stores to stop into since many were already out of Turkey day supplies the weekend before. So as I said, I spent a lot of time shopping, cooking and washing dishes. At least I enjoyed the Macy's Day Parade while I was cooking. I did not enjoy the Lions Football game. I did enjoy the company of our friends and playing with their new talking phone at dinner. And I was too exhausted to stay up and watch the Ravens Football game. I was sound asleep by 9pm. So Happy Thanksgiving to everyone that I missed! The kids kept themselves busy taking Cookie on a long walk around the lake in the park that backs up to our friend's house. That and video games kept them busy during the day.

We opted not to go out early in the morning on Black Friday to shop. Tom does the majority of his shopping on line anyway. We did make it a quest to find a new pull out couch/sectional for the basement to replace the broken set. We were in a hurry to get something in stock since my parents talked about visiting at Christmas. We did lots of online searches and spent a lot of time stopping into furniture stores all last week. We settled on a system from LazyBoy and then my parents announced that they probably would not be visiting at Christmas after all. So back went the couch system on Sunday night.

We decided we probably needed the extra funds to put towards fixing our roof as we discovered a large leak somewhere up there. Next week's project is to find a roofer. Preferably before any more big rain arrives.

On top of an already tight schedule, we had to get Allison to work on Friday and Sat. and I had a few more Cookie Booth sales this past weekend. At one point I was manning the cookie booth all alone(high school girls are way too busy). It is a good thing I am still cute cause I can certainly sell cookies. I plan on having one more booth sale next weekend. Thanks for the cookie donations Grandma and Grandpa Bozyk! We should be dropping off donations to the military for Christmas next week for shipping. Allison also still had deliveries to make of her own-she just hasn't been around enough to drop off all the cookies and desserts and pizzas she sold this Fall! Things are a little more relaxed now that Field Hockey is over.

Allison had half days of school last week, but it did not keep the teachers from loading up the time with lots of tests and homework assignments. She thought she would have it easy over break, but no such thing. Even Scott was busy with homework. And when he wasn't doing that, I kept him busy working on his Dog Care Merit BAdge for scouts. He had a scout meeting(finally he could go) last week but gymnastics was cancelled. Same with Allison's piano class.

And it was helpful being off work to pick the kids up from school on their half days, especially since it was raining at the beginning of the week. I ended up waiting for Allison for 1.5hrs in the school parking lot while she finished up a math test and met with her Field Hockey coach.

Poor Scott spent most of the holiday weekend searching for a friend to go rollerblading with at Allison's rink. Unfortunately, most of Scott's buddies had all headed out of town to visit family. And on Sunday we celebrated Scott's 12th Birthday! He started the day by serving mass(very entertaining since they began the new wording). FYI-we don't like it, but nobody asked us. WE THE PEOPLE doesn't count for much. Same in Girl SCouts when they changed our whole program and got rid of all badges. Don't bother asking us what we like-we just pay for everything and volunteer to run the programs(for free). Anyhow, we certainly enjoyed the new CAtholic phrases like "consubstantial". I prefer Constantinople-it flows better but doesn't really fit. After I screwed up Scott by telling him it was time to take up the bible for the opening prayer(the priest already had the bible), it was time to go home. But instead we headed off for our yearly family Holiday portrait. We had to wait over 30 mins for the crying babies to get their pictures, and then we took Scott out for Birthday lunch at Cheeburger Cheeburger. He got a huge free birthday ice cream dessert and we enjoyed pumpkin and candy cane milk shakes. He preferred an early celebration so he could go home and play his new video games. So besides Christmas shopping I had to do Birthday shopping(whatever Tom did not get online) and gift wrapping. 

And I will be off to work again next week(and at least I should not be contagious).

Scott says Thank You to all of you that sent Birthday cards and money. He has been having a good time shopping at Game Stop!

Kathleen