How Many More Marvelous Days?

Not long now until we go home. I'm starting to feel "pre-packing stress." I know that in some ways it will be much easier to pack to go home than it was to pack to get here. Especially since I've already sent back 2 large suitcases of stuff with Terry & Gwen. That will be a big help. Plus we'll have 2 more suitcases to use on the way home since we bought a full ticket for Julie, as opposed to just paying $200 to let her sit on our laps.

Speaking of Terry & Gwen, they left yesterday morning at 5.45 a.m. Steve drove them all to the airport and since we didn't hear otherwise, we assume they got on the plane and got home. We had a great time while they were here. See his blog http://drbubba.blogspot.com/ for more specifics about their visit. I think I'll have to print out that part of his blog when I print out my blog so that I can be lazy and just fill in the last 2 weeks with his input.

Speaking of printing out the blog, my plan is to print out the whole thing in chronological order and bind 3 copies of it - one for each kid to have when they get older. I've also gone to mypublisher.com and put together a picture album of our adventure from June through September and ordered 1 copy for each kid. They were shipped to my mom's house and she tells me that they look spectacular! That's always nice to hear. All I have to do now is get the September through December book ready to go and then wait for another sale to get them printed. I got a 50% coupon for the last set, otherwise I wouldn't have bothered.

Here's a statistic for you: out of the last almost 7 weeks, we've had house guests for 6. It's nice to get our house back. Everyone slept in their own room in their own bed last night.

It's raining now. It hailed for about a minute earlier when I was putting Julie down for her nap. I wouldn't have noticed it much except Julie has an angled ceiling with a window in the roof line. Did that make sense? Her window is not perpendicular to the ground but is at a 45 degree angle, so when the hail was coming down it was particularly loud in her room thanks to the window. We just had a nice loud clap of thunder and Audrey took 10 seconds out of her movie ("Aladdin") to act all scared. Yeah, right.

Today is Caleb's school's Christmas Bazaar. Audrey's school's was Wednesday. We got a haul at that one. We took a picture of all the stuff we won, but I'm going to wait to post it until we come back from Caleb's. We'll see if we're as lucky at this one. I think we might also go bowling late this afternoon with Cindy, Jarrett, & Connor. We haven't really got to see them much over the last couple of weeks, but we did have Thanksgiving dinner with them.

Speaking of Thanksgiving, it was very anti-climactic. Steve worked, we went to the grocery store, we returned the Adams' rental car, and then we ate at that great American institution, Chili's. We had such traditional Thanksgiving dinners as: hamburger, grilled chicken sandwich, creole pasta, shrimp, steak...you get the picture. Even though there was a pecan pie on the dessert menu, I don't think anyone ordered it. We all got chocolate things, except Connor, who got cheesecake. I'm not sure if Cindy got something, but I know that if she did it contained neither chocolate nor dairy, so it might have been the pecan pie.

By the way - I bought the copyrights to Julie's pictures, so feel free to print out as many as you want. Those are the only 2 that I bought since any more would have been ridiculously expensive.

I'm going to sign off now. But before I do, look what I found in Audrey's bag this week: