Spoiled

The girls and I have been mightily spoiled this week. Daniel, since his superiors are not giving him any work to do, took this entire week off! So he's been home, hanging out with us, without going in to work or working from home at all, for an entire week. And it's been the most wonderful week of my life!! I was commenting to Daniel at the start of this week that I'm so lucky that I like my husband and enjoy spending time with him. Many wives, when they learn that their husband is taking a whole week off of work, complain about it and say how the husband is just going to interrupt their routine and that it'll be miserable. I feel so fortunate that I am not one of those. Having him home this whole week has been like a dream! And we've done some fun things!

Unfortunately, I got sick a little over a week ago with a mild cold, which I then gave to my whole family. Daniel has been feeling mildly sick for weeks, it seems, and right when he was starting to feel better, he caught whatever I had and is feeling sick again this week. I was lucky in that my cold didn't last long. It seemed to peak on Monday or Tuesday, and by Wednesday, I was feeling pretty much as good as new. Poor Camille has gotten the worst of it, I think. She's been stuffy and her nose has been runny all week. None of us seem to have a bad cough, which has been good. Just nose stuff, and sore throat.

Anyway, despite that, we've done a little shopping, we've arranged for Christmas presents for the girls, we've watched some tv, we've played some games.... We took the girls to the library one day. Daniel and I even started a puzzle this week that we're close to finishing.

On Tuesday, we dropped the girls off at the Mapps house and Daniel took me out on a lunch date. We picked up pizza at Pizza Rev, and then went to a local park to make a little picnic of it. It was so fun! It was a nice, cool Fall day; the leaves were turning and falling, but it was bright and sunny and blue-skied outside. A perfect date!

    
We had sort of been expecting Aunt Liz and Uncle Bob to invite us for Thanksgiving ... because that's what we've done every other year. But ... Tuesday before Thanksgiving rolled around without hearing from them, and we figured they weren't going to invite. Which was fine! We weren't hurt or upset at all! But, we did need to figure out what we were doing. The Hills in our ward invited us to spend Thanksgiving with their family, and so Wednesday morning we finally got back to them and accepted their invitation. What's funny is that a few hours or so after that, Aunt Liz texted and asked if we would be able to come! And we laughed!

We could have done both dinners. The Hills were scheduled to eat around 12:30pm, and Aunt Liz said their dinner was at 4 pm. But ... Camille was really sick and obviously not feeling well. And by the time we got around to eating at the Hill's, it was after 2pm. We had a nice time with the Hills, though we felt a little bit out of place. The family is huge and crazy, which is totally fun. But we don't know every one of them. The dinner was delicious, and we were very grateful for their kindness and generosity.

We finished eating by around 3:30, so we texted Aunt Liz and told her we wouldn't be coming. Camille was clearly not feeling well and she was tired. We hung out at home for a little bit, the girls played while Daniel and I snoozed a little bit, we fed the girls a little bit, and then they went to bed a little bit early. It was a nice, relaxing Thanksgiving day!

Yesterday was our day to decorate for Christmas! Before Camille and Brooke went down for naps, we got down the Christmas boxes and put everything up. Then after naps, we went to Wal-mart to buy a Christmas Tree and a few other things. We came home, rearranged a few things, and put our tree up. Daniel and I were both pleasantly surprised by how pretty it is. It was all wrapped up at Wal-mart, so we couldn't really see how it looked and it was a shot in the dark as to how it would turn out. But it's beautiful! There aren't any bald spots in the branches and it's all very uniform looking. We have never had a real tree, in all the time we have been married. The first year we were married, we didn't get a tree because we didn't want to spend the money and because we would be spending a couple of weeks in Oregon and figured we wouldn't enjoy a tree for long enough anyway. But right after the season ended, Daniel got a fake Christmas tree for free that we used every year until this. It died last year. It was looking really sad, and parts of it were breaking off. It's so nice to have a real tree! It smells delicious in the house, and it's so beautiful! Our old tree served it's purpose, but it sure was ugly. :)

After the tree was up, Daniel strung the lights while I fed the girls a little dinner. When he was done, we all helped to put the ornaments on the tree. And now it's all complete! Christmas-time is officially here!