Time Flies When You're Ho-Ho-Ho-ing!

I have been baking.  Lots and lots of baking. My counters and table have been covered in cookie making messes...but the results have been wonderful.  Family, friends and the folks on my Mobile Meals Route are getting quite the cookie trays this year!

Several of you have commented about our Christmas card this year and how big both Spencer and Bowser have gotten.  Ironically, Bowser still thinks he is a tiny, wittle puppy and wants to be a lap dog.  He is always nudging his wide end into our laps! He is just as happy as if he had good sense.

Friday night, we celebrated Christmas with the Godwins.  After a gratuitous amount of time hiding from the camera and acting shy, the Godwin girls finally let me get some pictures:

Laura gave me a Holga camera for Christmas-- I CANNOT wait try it out!  It has been so many years since I have used film, I'm not going to know how to act!

And finally, we closed the weekend with a Christmas celebration with Will's side of the family:

It was the most fun "in-law boot camp" I have ever attended!

Deck the Halls with Shin Guards and To Do Lists

Even though I am trying to keep everything caught up at work, get my holiday shopping, wrapping and baking done and attend all the fun social events of the season, our schedules are still saturated with soccer.
Melissa coaches two teams (boys), a girls indoor team and she plays on an adult team. That's a lot of soccer!

This past weekend, Spencer's team lost to a really good team.  It was a very aggressive game--Spencer left the field with big, nasty bruises.  I didn't like that at all :(

The adult team was fun to watch-- my ex-in-laws played, too. The other team was short a few players and they recruited my ex-brother-in-law. Will "could" have played  but Scott was doing such a fine job...and Will had just eaten a huge dinner ...so he stayed on the bench in the Amen section with the rest of us.
My nieces are current scholarship soccer athletes, so they were our "ringers." Melissa did a great job in goal and our friend, Jason, managed to score several times and frustrate one of their players into a yellow card.  We cheered...and heckled..it was fun!

Now ...I have shopping to finish, cookies to bake, mobile meals to deliver, parties to attend, friends and family to visit...  The two weeks before Christmas has so much energy and excitement. I love this time of year!

Girls Weekend Away: Myrtle Beach

I took Friday off and four of us (it was supposed to be 5-- we missed you Dee!) headed to Myrtle Beach for a relaxing weekend of holiday shopping. We arrived late Friday afternoon, shopped at the outlets and then had dinner at Dixie Stampede.  Their Christmas show was fantastic!  This is their last season in Myrtle Beach-- at the end of the year they are closing and re-opening in June with a Pirate theme.  The boys should love it!
Saturday was dedicated to the Arts and Crafts show at Springmaid Beach Resort.  Luckily, this is where we stayed as well so we could take our purchases back to the room and keep on shopping all day! Even though it was chilly at the beach, it was still sunny as we kept getting weather updates from home and pictures of our families playing in the first snowfall of the season!
We shopped  our way to Fiesta Del Burro Loco for dinner and closed out Saturday with even more shopping.  By checkout on Sunday, we had to play one mean game of Tetris with the luggage and packages to get everything to fit in the car and still have room enough for us to get our seatbelts buckled! So we didn't miss Dee quite as much at that moment (ha ha) but we would have made it if she could have joined us!
The good news is that my Christmas shopping is about 75% done!

Decade Mark

As hard as it is to believe, Spencer is 10 years old now.  He insisted on having his birthday party on his actual birthday--a Wednesday-- so we ended up having an after school play date and dinner. 
Nana and Boppa rented a bounce house and we fixed all kinds of snacks and made hot dogs. The kids could play/graze whenever they wanted.  We had to take the cake to the front porch to sing Happy Birthday and let Spencer blow out his candles because we couldn't get the kids to stop playing long enough to do "party" things. 

They had the bounce house, the swings/see-saw area by the pool, the field in front of Nana and Boppa's for football games and soccer games---then dart gun wars.  My favorite pictures from the party are the ones of all the little boys playing football (while the little girls finally got time in the bounce house without all the rough-housing!)--Thanks to Laura for being on camera patrol while I was busy with host stuff.

One of the highlights from the party: I had 7 boys in the car whom I had just picked up after school (the rest were dropped off later) and as we drove down the road, they all cheered wildly when they saw the bounce house in the front yard.  My son-- typical Spencer-- turns around from the front seat and announces, "No One gets in the bounce house until our homework is done!"  and yes he was serious!

And although the bounce house was very clean and the people we rented it from were super nice, I will NEVER do it again.  We had more injuries than I can count.  Busted noses, lips, bumped noggins, stepped on ribs, hands, etc.  We kept the bounce house to 8-10 kids (what was recommended) but they kept knocking into each other or bouncing on top of one another. Instead of having candy and toys, this party had treat bags filled with Advil and ice packs.

But, everyone still had fun.  Spencer loved every minute of it and hopefully made lots of great memories.