Happy New Year!

Today is New Year's Eve, and it would be very convenient if we ended up having the baby tonight, but chaSo there are nces don't seem great. See, if we have the baby tonight, we don't have to pay our deductible for our insurance. Since we have private insurance, we pay $3500 before the insurance foots a penny, but then, at least, it does cover pretty much everything else. So if we do end up having the baby at the first of the year, we won't have to worry about any other medical emergencies. But the thing is that we probably won't spend $3500 before we end up going to school, where they should have some sort of group insurance. GROUP INSURANCE! YAY!! So, anyway, we went for a walk last night to see if we could encourage the baby to come, and he didn't seem to want to come last night. I even ran about 100 yards. I am 37 weeks today, so it would really be just fine if the baby comes today. The baby will be healthy. At my 31 week ultrasound, the baby was 4 1/2 pounds already, so with six more weeks of growing, he should really be fine. :) Anyway, we will do a post when he comes. Until then, we're planning on having a New Years Eve party with scones today. :) My cousin Kim said that it used to be a tradition at my Grandma Skouson's house to have scones on New Year's Eve, so I wanted to be a part of that this week. We're excited! Happy New Year to everyone!

Christmas Eve

I have several posts from the Christmas season that I want to write, and I thought about writing them backwards, but to try to keep this blog as sort of a journal, too, I decided that for my own sake, I'm going to write the posts in the time order that they happened. However, some of the things won't be happy and might be a bit grotesque thanks to our furry roommates, so please, if the killing of innocent animals bugs you, please don't read these posts.

So, our friend Melissa over at http://takingwhatisleft.blogspot.com commented that if the mice were going to live there, at least they could help me clean up like the ones in Cinderella do. Apparently, on Christmas Eve, one decided to try to help. He wanted to help wash the crockpot bowl that was soaking overnight in my sink because of stuck on food that we couldn't get off. We didn't know it though, so I started to dump out the soapy water, so I could wash the bowl, and there I found it, a mouse had drowned in my crockpot. . . I must have jumped at least 6 inches, and Rob said that he wishes he had a picture of the face I made. I was totally grossed out, and I thought about chucking the crock pot and going to target and getting a new one where they are on sale for $15. I came to my senses however, and I kindly let Rob have the honors of going to dump the mouse into the outside trash can. It was a tramatic experience. However, Christmas Eve did get much better from there.

We cleaned up the kitchen and the house a lot, and then we went into the room with our lovely $20 Christmas tree and read the story of Christ's birth directly from Luke. The kids were pretty enthralled with it actually. They got to open their Christmas Even pajamas, and then we all piled in the car to go to Thomasville.

In Thomasville, we ate at Applebee's, and the kids enjoyed that. Then, we got in the car to look at Christmas lights. Thomasville has a beautiful public house that is decorated to the nines and they have a Christmas display set up specifically for cars to just drive around the old plantation and look at Christmas lights. I got a few decent pictures of this one, so I hope to put up that post later. ONce we got home, Jackie went to bed right away, but Ben wasn't so sure he wanted Santa to come. He wanted Christmas to come, but he wasn't overly fond of Santa, so when we told the kids to go to bed because Santa can't come when kids are awake, Jackie went right to sleep. Ben, however, tried to stay up, so Santa wouldn't come. At 12:30 am, we finally got him to sleep, filled up the stockings and went to bed. I hope to get the pictures from my camera downloaded, so you'll see some of the pictures of the lights. That will have to come later though.

I hope everyone had a very Merry Christmas (or whatever you celebrate, but this is my blog, so I wish a Merry Christmas) and I hope people go on to have a wonderfully happy New Year.

If you like Scrapbooking

Life as Lou is an awesome scrapbooking blog. She is a designer for Cosmo Cricket and Quickutz, and she also teaches scrapbooking classes at a local (to her) and internet store called The Scrapbook Nook. She is amazing at what she does. She's also a first class mom. If you get a chance, hop over to her. The link I left is for a drawing for $150 in scrapbook supplies. If you're interested in this awesome blog, head on over and check out her blog. Also, she has a Christmas album class up on her blog that looks like tons of fun. If I were any good at scrapping, I might try this. If you're interested in the rest of her blog, just click the Home link at the top, and you can have hours of interesting reading. Good luck to all scrappers out there.

Unexpected

Haave you ever had a day where everything that happens is either unexpected, or nothing you expected to do works out?

It sort of started out the night before when Jackie just absolutely refused at all costs to go to bed. I finally gave up trying to work on it at 11:30. She fell asleep at 2. We told her at 11:30 that she could stay up and not go to school. She threw a fit about wanting to go to school, and we told her that if she wanted to go to school the next day, that was fine, but she had to go to sleep. If she didn't go to sleep in the next 10 minutes, there would be no school, and Daddy and Mommy weren't going to bug her about it. She could choose. She chose.

I have never had a day like that so much as yesterday. It started out that while I was getting ready to teach seminary, I got a call from the mother of one of my students that the girl had an emergency. I needed to go be with the mom through this emergency, so I cancelled seminary. (This was a big emergency.) Then, I called Rob and the Branch President to come give the girl a blesssing, and Rob also ended up asking the Branch President's wife to come get the kids, so I wouldn't have to leave the mom.

When I was on my way to go pick up my kiddos, I got a call from my friend who was planning on helping me unpack some more. She was at my house, and I wasn't there. I stopped by on my way to pick up the kids and gave her the keys to my house, and then I went to get the kids. Once I got home, my friend and I decided not to really unpack but just to let the kids hang out. that was good, but Jackie was sort of a pill (I know, shocker; she got all of 5 hours of sleep the night before!) and I was absolutely exhausted. We let the kids play until lunch time, and then I put BOTH of the kids down for naps. I was adamant that Jackie had to actually go to sleep. By 3 they were asleep, which was unexpected. My friend was supposed to come back, but while she was running errands, her son had an accident and ended up having to go to the ER to get his nose X-rayed. While they were there, the poor little guy had another type of accident and didn't have any dry pants. So, I stayed home and got a little bit done, but also, Rob got off work unexpectedly early, and we left for Tallahassee early. We had to take a computer down there. Also while we were there, I thought that there would be a great sale at Kohl's on a KitchenAid mixer. The sale wasn't nearly as good as I thought, so I didn't get one. Everything just seemed to be different from what I planned yesterday, and even though I'm almost through another entire day, I'm still not sure I'm recovered.

Still not unpacked

I can't seem to get the motivation today to keep unpacking and doing laundry and the other million things I have to do (like wrap Christmas presents, so I can get them in the mail and get them to family in time for Christmas). So, I'm thinking that I'll just blog instead. I have lots of fun things to blog about. Particularly a really awesome story time they did at the library a couple weeks ago, but I just can't get up the energy right now to do that either. Instead, i'm sitting on my bed, while my children watch Clifford on the TV in my room and I just sit here blogging and looking on the internet. At least last night, Rob and the kids got a ton unpacked out of my living room, and I can use it. So I'm resting a bit.