Hello Holidays!

The fridge is bursting with Thanksgiving leftovers......I'm mourning the end of a long weekend.....the family is all napping......the bank account is starting to feel the hurt of the holidays thanks to online shopping (lol), and I'm happy as a clam because I LOVE this time of year. LOVE IT!

Plus, my birthday is next week.....who doesn't like their own birthday after all? :D Although, I love to remind people that those of us with December birthdays totally get the shaft......not only did 90% of my birthday gifts come wrapped in Christmas paper when I was a kid (a huge pet peeve of mine now)....but I just KNEW.......that I was basically getting one less gift for Christmas. bah! I admire the people that celebrate their kids' December birthdays in June instead. BRAVO I say! But I digress....rant over.....for now anyways!

The holiday festivities started off with the kids' programs at school. Matthew was a Pilgrim AND an Indian. I'm still not sure why, but whatever. He said his lines, he did well....he didn't humiliate me by inserting the words "poop" or "terd" in his monologues, so I was happy. At his age, that's saying a lot!

Zach's PreK class had a feast, but since I was watching Matthew's program, I missed most of it. They even made their own butter....how cool are they!

We hosted Thanksgiving here at our house, as we've done for the last several years now. Too much food was cooked and consumed.....and is still in my fridge. I pondered for the 12th year in a row WHY I bother making cranberry sauce when maybe 2 teaspoonfulls of it actually gets eaten! :P because it's tradition, that's why! and I've been told I make an awesome green bean casserole......but I don't eat the stuff, so I'll have to take their word for it.....again, tradition!

So then I started pondering other traditions that my family has...... My father always says the blessing before the meal. He and Karl argued for about 30 seconds over who would say Grace, but we all knew that in the end he'd do it. Because it's TRADITION! :P Mom and I made way too much food. Again, TRADITION! Dean and Stacy were late getting here.....which has become a new tradition (one that irks me, but eh, during the holidays, you pick your battles, kwim?). The meal that took me roughly 3 days to prepare was consumed in about 20 minutes.....tradition! then once everyone was done eating, we all disappeared, leaving Karl to do the majority of the dishes.....tradition! then it was dozing in front of the TV and chatting......and then a fairly-new tradition.....the impromptu photo shoot.

my SIL stacy is a photographer.....i sometimes like to think I'm one too. :D we have the same camera and flashes, so we set up a backdrop and attempted (note I said ATTEMPTED) to take some pictures of our dog for our Christmas card this year. eh, it didn't work out so well, shockingly....dog didn't exactly cooperate!

Then she wanted me to take pictures of her, Dean, and their little foster baby, John. So I got to play photographer then.......the instant i noticed one of the external flashes wasn't going off, Stacy jumped up and raced behind the backdrop (where said flash was) and started screaming.....I go and look and start screaming.

My fancy external wireless flash.....had melted. O.M.G. for those of you out there with expensive photography equipment.....share my grief for a moment. I get the sniffles just thinking about it. Apparently those "hot lights" (hence the name, duh) get way hotter than either of us had anticipated, and having a flash too close to one of them results in disaster for anything made of plastic. *sniff*.....goodbye, nice external flash. Expensive boo-boo! So since it was my flash and stacy was the one that put it where it was....she took the blame and is buying me a new flash. I'm guessing that's my christmas gift from her! still.....that totally stinks. poor little melted flash. *sigh*

That was enough excitement for one evening.....once that drama had subsided, everybody started to leave......and thanksgiving was done.

Black Friday: We didn't participate this year, woohoo! Karl was disappointed I think, because he's a morning person, so getting up at 4AM and fighting mobs of angry women over a $3 crockpot I don't need is his idea of a good time. Me? I'd rather sleep 'till noon and go to Amazon.com and shop there. :D And this year, online sites were offering some of the same prices as the early-bird specials (at least on the stuff we wanted), so there really wasn't much need to get up and fight the mobs. fine by me!

Saturday and Sunday were fairly relaxing. We went out to run some errands and took the kids through the Way of Lights (drive-thru light display) after dinner (there's only so much leftover turkey/ham a person can realistically take, kwim?), and they loved it. it's beautiful! Highly recommend it if you're in the STL area!

and now the Holiday weekend is over and regular life is back in full swing.....which includes all the homework/activities we usually cram into a week! So with that I'm off to stop one child from stuffing another in a box. Yay for family fun!