December 8-14

Sunday, December 8th: Our church was not canceled like a lot of other wards (from the weather), so it was a pretty normal Sunday for us. After church, I took the kids over to play at our neighbor Clarice's house, who has a little boy named Carter. We had met them a few months ago while Tyler and I were on a walk, and we've been trying to work out a time where we could get together. It took an ice storm to make it happen, but I'm so glad it did! The kids had such a great time, and it was really fun to see her house. It has the same layout as our home, but she owns hers, and has done some amazing renovations and remodeling.

Monday, December 9th: Tyler, Jamie and I hung out at home, waiting out the cold weather and ice that was still hanging around. During his yard time, Bronx got into the bags of leaves that hadn't gotten to the curb yet, and it was pretty hilarious. I took a video of it and sent it to McKay. McKay, king of memes, replied:

Feeling guilty :)

Tuesday, December 10th: In the morning, Jamie and I hosted the last day of Joy School. We also had the Martinez kids, and the house was pretty chaotic! I didn't mind too much, because those princess dresses were being put to good use, although Jamie preferred to be "Izzie with a cape" :) I went to go study again afterwards (blech), while McKay worked on a few things around the house, and the kids built a Legos version of Downtown Dallas :) At this point, I was starting to feel pretty lousy about all the time I was needing to spend away from home. The kids are getting old enough that when I'm away, its not just time away from grumpy babies. I'm actually missing fun things they do, and sweet little moments. I suppose this is part of going back to school with children, but it's still hard to realize I'm going to be missing out. The temperature had risen back to normal levels, and most of the roads were back to normal. McKay took advantage of the nice day and raked up the obscene amount of leaves in our front and back yards, with the kids help. They managed to snap our rake, and had to run to Lowes and get another :) Tyler spent the afternoon telling McKay about his troubles in school with a boy named Rmodrick (?) who seems to delight in teasing Tyler about silly things. We gave him a few pointers on how to deal with mean kids at school, but it's pretty hard imagining anyone being mean to our sweet little guy.

Wednesday, December 11th: The final!!! Ahh, its finally over! I felt pretty good about how it went, but I'm not too worried about my grade in the class. I calculated what I need for my final grade. I currently have an 87 in the class. To get an A in the class, I'll need a 97 on this exam. To lower my current grade to a C, I would need to get lower than 47. I'm pretty confident I'm getting a B :) Cindy watched the kids during the test, and they had such a great time with their Grandma. We took Christmas card pictures that night in front of the Christmas tree, and then went out for ice cream afterwards. It took literally about 100 tries, but we got a great shot.

This is the point at which they stopped cooperating...

 ...and this is where they started dancing.

Friday, December 13th: I finally finished my Home sign for our bedroom. This is the first place we've lived long enough for me to get around to decorating McKay's and my room.

Match.com had their annual holiday party, which was Masquerade themed. I took the kids to Joann's to find two fancy masks for the party, and I had to promise them that I would only be using them for that night. They would be free game for everyone else afterwards. Tyler had fun playing with the rest of the store: McKay and I had a really wonderful night. I hit it off with a wife of his coworkers, and we made plans to get together for dinner in January. The whole night was really fun, and fancy! It was catered by Wolfgang Puck, and there were all sorts of crazy things, cigar rolling, photo booths, caricatures, fortune telling. Everyone was in crazy masks, and one guy dressed up as the Phantom.

Saturday, December 14th: We threw a holiday party of our own, an Ugly Sweater party. The house was so packed! We all voted for the ugliest sweater, and then played Name That Famous Sweater, and had a White Elephant gift exchange. Everyone brought food to share (we provided the main course, a Honeybaked Ham, and our Cranberry drink), and the kids (of which there were many) happily played in Tyler and Jamie's rooms all night while the adults had a great time in the front rooms. Our gift exchange was insane. Some of our guests turned out to be Yankee Swap purists, and our gifts included a Combover Headband, a home Marijuana test, and some sort of Native American spear. I think we've been spoiled with the Hinckley gift exchange, where we all try to bring presents we'd like to get :)