Catch-Up

I know, I know, I know. I'm a bad, bad blogger.

The good news is that we've interviewed and selected a candidate and offered her the position that I'm covering that's eating up so much of my time, and she's accepted! The bad news is that, due to a paperwork snafu, she won't be starting until Jan. 3. However, the last couple of weeks of the year are usually fairly slow, punctuated by periods of intense panic. I'd been counting on using those weeks to start getting our new person trained and up to speed on the bewilderingly similar glorp of acronyms and project names we all take for granted, but instead she's going get dropped into the crazy that is the start of the year. Ah, well.

At any rate, I hope to be back to regular blogging in the next few weeks. Maybe. Hopefully.

In the meantime, a little catch-up!

Thanksgiving was lovely:

And then we decorated for Christmas:

(I love this picture... Matt and the kids decorated the tree while I was doing the outside lights, and Matt suggested to Alex that he "spread out" a bit... so Alex valiantly put his ornaments on both sides of the branch.)

This past weekend was especially nice, I thought. We went to a Christmas parade Saturday morning:

And after that we stopped at Wasabi for lunch. Despite which, Penny's blood sugars remained on a fairly even keel all day! Yay!

We'd had plans to go see Santa that afternoon, but Alex's nap ran long (the parade had just tired the poor little guy out) and our Santa is only available from 11 to 4, so we just relaxed for the afternoon, instead.

Sunday morning, we woke to a light dusting of snow on the ground -- the perfect kind: just enough to get the kids excited, but not enough to mess up the roads. It was mostly melted, in fact, by the time we left to go see Santa.

As always, the New Town Santa was amazing. We were the first people there, and no one else had arrived, so Santa talked to Penny for at least 20-25 minutes before another family arrived. Alex flatly refused to sit on Santa's lap, but toward the end, he edged closer to Santa to accept a coloring book, and then threw caution to the wind and gave him a big hug. Santa happily posed for pictures, and his assistant willingly took the camera so we could get a family shot for the holiday card.

(This is not the one we chose for the card.)

Just outside Santa's spot, there was a bench where someone had scraped up probably all the snow in New Town and made a small snowman with it:

That afternoon, I took Alex to a birthday party for one of his school friends. It was at the new Inflation Nation here in town, and holy cow, that place is huge. I'd had to wake Alex up from his nap to go, so he wasn't actually interested in playing until about the last ten or fifteen minutes of the play-period, but he was All About the Elmo hat and Abby Kadabby whistle he got in the party room!

(This was only 1 of at least eight enormous bounce castles/slides/doohickeys.)

So now I think we're all caught up, more or less. I'm looking forward to this coming weekend, when we'll be having the first of two moon cookie parties. (We couldn't find a day when all our friends could make it, so we've split it into two. Given the number of people becoming involved in this tradition, it might even work out better this way.) The weekend after that is the second moon cookie party, and the weekend after that will be... Christmas!

Wow, it comes quick. No, I'm not done with my shopping yet. (But almost!)

So, what've you been up to for the last couple of weeks?