Thanksgiving 2014

This past Thursday was Thanksgiving and this year, as always, we have a lot to be thankful for.  If you have read this blog for any amount of time you probably already know my love for Thanksgiving.  One of the main reasons for this is because of its focus on the family and this year I felt that in a different way than before.  This year, almost all of our extended family was away, Jeremy's whole family, my parents and both of my sisters' families.  That just left us and Brendon's family to have Thanksgiving dinner together and it was really great, but just a small portion of the time we had off work over the last several days.  That meant that the time left to spend together and focus on the family was just us, our little family, Jeremy, Sarah, Merrick, and Carrigan.  Let me just say, I really love my family!  That isn't to say that we didn't miss those who were not here, because we did, it was just nice to strengthen those closest ties.

Anyway, after that tangent that hopefully made at least a little bit of sense, let me tell you a few other things about our Thanksgiving holiday.  First and foremost, the food was delicious, I mean amazingly good.  Secondly,  we were able to do some great Black Friday shopping, mostly online with one quick trip to Wal-Mart on Thursday evening.  I feel like we outdid ourselves this year and not only got some amazing deals, but essentially finished our Christmas shopping (hooray!).

Tomorrow it is back to the real world, but the countdown to Christmas has begun and the time is going to fly.

P.S. Jeremy took this picture of Merrick at dinner last night.  Either he was really excited about his ice cream sundae or he was trying to channel his Nana and Papa in India (is that racist???).

Home Bound

This week was fairly low key and as the blog title would imply, we were home bound much of the time.  The week started off normally enough until we were woken up just after midnight of what was then Tuesday morning by Merrick screaming.  We rushed in to his room to find that he had vomited all over himself and his bed.  After a long clean-up that ultimately involved laundry and moping, we decided I would sleep with him to keep an eye on him.  The rest of the night he threw up every hour and often, after cleaning up, we didn't have time to fall back to sleep before the next round would start.

Needless to say we were all exhausted and needing to rest the next day.

By Wednesday we thought we were out of the woods until Carrigan got sick at breakfast.  Thankfully it turned out to be a false alarm and our rest day on Wednesday just ended up being precautionary.

In addition to all the sickies, we had another reason to stay home this week.  The windows in our kitchen (which are brand new) have been leaking.  We have been trying to get them repaired for a few weeks now, but the repairman either does not show up when he says he will or, as was the case this week, they come and spend hours and hours working only to not fix the problem.  Ultimately they have just covered the windows until they can get to the bottom of the problem.

All of this was mostly just to say that I don't really have anything exciting to report on this week.  What I do have, however, is a gem of a picture from a couple weeks ago that never made it onto the blog.  Here is Merrick asleep in bed with several makeshift beds he created for his stuffed animals out of his extra blankets and pillow (and let me tell you, all those extra blankets and pillows also came in really handy this week when he was sick all night and you can only do laundry so fast).

 

Jeremy's Birthday

Today is Jeremy's birthday and that makes it a seriously special day!  32 years ago this handsome guy (the bigger one) was born and since then he has done nothing but make the world a better place.

We started our day of celebration with birthday doughnuts and presents and I have planned a special turkey dinner (which has the added bonus of acting as a dry run for Thanksgiving) for tonight.

31 was a pretty good year for Jeremy, he graduated law school and passed the bar, but I have a feeling that 32 is going to be even better.  32 is going to be the year that he lands his first big attorney job and so much more.

Happy birthday Jeremy!  Thanks for being the world's greatest husband, father, and friend.  We love you!

Fall Back (Into Bed)

Last week we experienced the cruel semi-annual tradition of a daylight savings time change.  Being from AZ I really don't understand why we do this.  I think it has something to do with when we were an agricultural society, but I don't think it is worth my time in a Google search to find out for sure.  What I do know is that for those of us with children, it is a cruel social experiment about what happens when you mess with the very fragile internal clock of a young child.

This time we "gained" an hour.  It sounds really nice, but what it actually means for those of us with children is that they will go to bed at their normal time, be unaware that they have an extra hour that they could devote to precious sleep, and wake up at the crack of dawn.  Meanwhile, us foolish parents thinking we get an extra hour decide stay up a bit later than normal.  This is a HUGE mistake because what inevitably follow is weeks of a poor, disrupted sleep routine.

How all of this shook out for us this week is that last Sunday both children were awake at 5:45 (that is AM people!!!).  Over the week Merrick has slowly crept closer to his normal wake up time of about 6:45, but CC who typically has to be woken up when we leave the house at 7:40 has only slept past 7 twice and has been up before 6 more times than I care to think about.  As a result she is falling asleep in the car at 9:00 AM and then refusing to take a real nap later.

We struggle with sleep enough as it is in this family and could really do without this added nonsense.  Maybe instead of researching the origins of daylight savings time, I will dedicate that time to research what is takes to get something on the ballot and try to vote daylight savings time out of existence.

Halloween 2014

This past weekend was Halloween.  I always say that Thanksgiving is my favorite holiday, but this year Halloween definitely gave it a run for its money.  The fun started last Friday at our church chili cook-off and trunk-or-treat.  On this day we discovered that Merrick loved his costume and CC not so much.  Regardless, they both loved the candy they got that night.

The next day we kept the fun rolling by going to "Howloween" at the zoo with our Brown cousins and some friends.  The kids went on a scavenger hunt around the zoo and collected prizes and treats.

Friday the main event finally rolled around.  As tradition, we left from Nana and Papa's (our) house and went with all our cousins (minus Kai in AZ and Lauren and Julien who are too old now).  Also, as tradition, the rain cleared for a dry, perfect evening of trick-or-treating.

Merrick was really into it, which was not a surprise.  At the start of the evening I wondered if we would need to get Carrigan counseling afterward as she was not loving Quincy's Hulk mask and she was especially not loving Uncle Ben who was dressed up as a giant State Farm teddy bear.  As the evening wore on however CC really came into her own.  She realized that she could get down and walk on her own and after that would not tolerate being carried, even for a second.  She would run up to each door as fast as her legs could carry her.  As soon as she would see the "nany" (candy) bowl she would start chanting "taint-tu", "taint-tu", "taint-tu" until she got her piece.  At the end of the night Carrigan was the last one still getting "nany".

Merrick is already looking forward to Halloween next year and I bet CC would be too if she knew enough to know it was a yearly thing.