Thanksgiving and on to Christmas

Maybe I should let him cry for a few minutes more often! He went back to sleep pretty quickly. Anyway, that post was a bit abbreviated about Thanksgiving - we really had a great time with family and amazing food (as always, Mom!) and of course, Legos. And Joshua did great on the way down - he slept pretty much the whole first two hours, and then was awake for awhile and only grumpy for about 20 minutes before he fell asleep for the last hour or so. We had such a good time and didn't want to leave!

So now...this week we've been faced with preparing for the owner coming on Monday to see the property (meaning pressure-wash the buildings, pull out all the dead plants and bushes, trim all the hedges, clean all of the stairwells so they are free of cobwebs, and a billion other things that Nathan has done/needs to do) and get to know us in our apartment (meaning a HUGE overhaul on the condition of our apartment). Along with the owner, the 2nd in command of our company (so our boss' boss) is coming too. He is really really strict about policies and procedures - he actually sent us a letter in the mail (using 41 cents, I might add) to tell us that an envelope we'd sent the company was 7 cents short on postage, so the company had to pay it, and that it was NOT acceptable, and the money adds up, etc. Seems like a phone call about 7 cents would have been better than a 41 cent letter. Anyway, since our home is our office, we don't have anywhere to sit and chat with them other than our home. So far I've done a lot of organizing of the desk area, a very extensive dusting of everything in the living room, and I'm trying to get all of our Christmas stuff up - it's getting pretty festive in here. So let's talk about Christmas - it'll be a busy enough weekend - I need to take a mental break from it right now!

I love Christmas, and I love decorating for Christmas. Eventually we'll get a real tree (I LOVE having a real Christmas tree), but we don't have room this year. We had one small two foot tree that I've had for years, and we have that up, but we decided to get a 4 foot fake tree to put on the table in the corner of our living room. We've got lights on it, an angel on it, and a grand total of 8 ornaments. We have about 7 billion ornaments, so the process of choosing which get to go on it this year will be challenging. For the last two years, we've used Nathan's parents' old fake tree, which worked just fine, but we don't have room for it, either. Anyway, I'm enjoying getting stuff set up for Christmas. Actually Christmas decorations got me to start putting holes in the wall (gasp!), so hopefully I'll keep up with that. I don't really want to still have naked walls for our stressful guests on Monday.

Since Nathan's parents are going to Texas for Christmas (it would have been our year to be with them if we switch back and forth), we're going up to my parents' again, which is so great because they get to see Joshua again so soon! And we get to see them, of course. Another reason why a fake tree is good, since we'll be up there for almost a week.

We have a little chalkboard with "___ days til Christmas!" on it, and today I wrote 25! Tomorrow we start our advent calendars, and I'm very excited. We have a really cool log cabin one that we got last year and we need to unpack it today so it is ready to go for the start of advent tomorrow!

Ok well this is getting me all motivated to go unpack more Christmas stuff and do more decorating, so I think I'll do just that.

Thank you, other bloggers, for all the posting you're doing - it makes me happy to be updated on everyone's lives. Oh and I added a little poll on the side after being inspired by Tracy!