On Top of It

Merry Christmas!!

I tried to wait until all of my cards were out this year before posting this sweet picture but I still have a few left to send.  Being in the military means about a fourth of your list moves every year.  It makes sending cards that much more work and hopefully that much more meaningful to those who receive them!  We were out of town from the 14-28 so I came home to a huge pile of cards.  It was SO fun to open them all!  My plan this year is to pray for someone as a family each night at the dinner table.  We'll make it through the cards a few times and hopefully it will help us to be more meaningful as we remember our friends in prayer!

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So apparently I was on CRACK when I made our airplane reservations.  I'm not sure what part of "leaving from Atlanta at 6:45 PM" I thought was a good idea but seriously none of it was.  We left Chattanooga at 3pm (making an emergency stop for diapers since I accidentally mailed all of ours back home).  We flew out at 6:45 Eastern and finally got in bed at 3AM Pacific (which felt like 6 AM Eastern).  Oh my word.  Exhaustion.  Thankfully the boys were pretty amazing on the trip.  I have some hilarious "how to sleep anywhere" photos that I'll be posting  later in the week!

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One of my post Christmas "to dos" was to get a Christmas tree.  I've enjoyed having a real tree the last few years but wanted to have an artificial one for those times that Peter might be deployed or TDY.  We were checking out the last tree at Lowes last night when this couple came up to us and offered us theirs for free.  We drove to their house today and picked it up.  It's a little shorter than I hoped for but I figured I'm not going to want to mess around with a huge tree by myself anyway.  It's prelit and has colored lights.  Not my favorite but I know the boys will love that over the next few years.  I always loved colored lights when I was a kid.  What a blessing this was!

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We haven't given the boys all of the gifts yet because we were gone and it has literally taken all of energy just to get through errands the last couple of days.  I am SO excited for the last part of their gift to come.....a train set!!  Between my parents and "Umple" Steven we were able to purchase a train table and a train set.  Once it arrives we plan to put it together during naptime and then surprise the Little Guy.  He is going to freak out!!

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Speaking of freaking out, we took the boys to Rock City to see the lights in Chattanooga. I'll be posting about this later this week because it was seriously one of my favorite nights ever.  All I can say was even if no one else had fun, the Little Guy had enough fun for everyone!

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I hope your holidays have been wonderful!  We are filling our last few days off with church, cleaning and potty training!!  Whoa!!!  Please stop back by for some new recipes and don't forget to enter my giveaway!!