Holiday feels

Wow. Less than one week til Christmas and I'm feeling like we just started. Is that normal once you have kids? The holiday season just flies by and soon it's another year gone and you feel like you missed it all? That's been the theme of this year, at least.

Work is slow for me this time of year, and actually the company I freelance for is closed from Christmas Eve through New Year's Day, so I get a nice little forced break. I'd probably try to take it off if it wasn't, but it's nice to be forced to take vacation. We've been doing little excursions every day to get out of the house in my free time, even if it's just to Target/Costco/the library. I'm kind of itching for Cora to drop her morning nap so we can do a little bit more in the mornings before she's hella cranky and tired, but if she's like Kate she's going to hold onto it until she's 2, so we'll see.

We've been slowly plugging away at the fireplace installation, in little bits of time and energy we find every other day or so. Of course, as per all of our house projects, 99% of the work is done by David while I make annoying changes throughout the process and try to wrangle the children away from the work zone. We've got a very classy Christmas tree+couch+shut door combination doing a lot of the blocking work right now, but they still have to be somewhat entertained and fed, etc. etc., while projects go on, so someone has to do that.

Plus as you can probably imagine, we're not quite at the speed of home projects as pre-cancer-days, which is 100% acceptable. And by we I still mean David. :) He's doing great but tires quickly, so we're taking it slow. Plenty of time to make changes to our design which he just loves.

We're ready to prime and paint next, so that is one of my actual jobs -- picking out a color, at least. If you've got any dark gray paint recommendations that doesn't read blue in any lighting, hmu. I'm buying a gazillion samples this time because my last 3 gray paint attempts were somewhat failures, so I'm playing it safe.

Christmas in Omaha is not complete (apparently!) without a visit to Mulhall's to see the reindeer and admire their incredibly gorgeous and beautifully styled Christmas wonderland. We took plenty of photos and the girls loved running around (Kate) and trying to pull everything off the table or display (Cora).

I'm trying to come up with a few simple Christmasy/Advent things we can do in the next few days for Kate to celebrate. She helped David make cookies last night (with SO much concentration, it's adorable) and I think we'll watch the free Nutcracker ballet on Amazon after naps today. She's getting into the spirit of Christmas more and more, and I love watching it - but it has somewhat devolved into saying she wants everything she sees at Target "for Cwismas, Mama!" so we need to work on that.

I hope your holidays are joyous and simple, and you eat lots of delicious food (the most important part of practically any Christmas celebration). I'm praying for you!
HG