Everybody else has been so good about blogging lately, even on Thanksgiving. I'm not sleepy enough to go to bed, regardless of the late hour, so I figured I should blog. Good of me, isn't it? ;-)

Let's see... last time I blogged was on Sunday night. Here are some pictures of the Church signs we were working on on Saturday. The first is the sign out by the road (the one I was sticking letters onto when the bulldog came plowing into me!)--there is another sign identical to this on on the other side of the church. The second picture is of the lighted sign above the door.

We spent the day Monday roaming all over Albuquerque to do some "drive-by's" (ha!) for some houses we'd found online. 18 houses, to be exact. There's no sense calling a realtor until you've actually driven past a house in person. Pictures are very deceiving--and they tell you nothing of the neighborhood! Anyway, we contacted a realtor that afternoon and he hopped in the car and took us to the 3 houses we had decided would be worth looking at. Really liked the first one--definite possiblity. It's too modern or contemporary (or whatever!) on the inside for my taste, but it would accomodate us well and I would do my very best to countrify it and make it into my home. :-) Anyway, the realtor asked lots of questions and I was amazed at how quickly he was able to size us up--by 8:00 that night he had come up with 5 other houses that are "our type," right down to the bricks (I hate stucco and adobe stuff--and 90% of what's in Albuquerque is just that! Ha!), we want a nice, quiet neighborhood where we can feel "safe" with the kids, we want a fenced yard for them, and I want grass--something else that can be hard to come by in Albuquerque! (Lots of rock and gravel landscaping.) Anyway, the guy took us to see two more houses the next morning, one of which is a possibility as well. I know God will open the right doors for us when it's the right time. Like, when our current house sells! It's great to have found a realtor who actually invests the time and interest in our business and is actually WORKING for us! Wow! I should bake him a pie. ;-)

Side Note: On the way home--at about 6:00 in the evening--we stopped for dinner. Joe went into the bathroom and came out giggling. He had discovered that he was wearing TWO pairs of ghandi's. I had tossed fresh ghandi's to both boys at the motel that morning and simply said, "Put 'em on." Talk about obedience! Ha! That little dork didn't think to take the old ones off first. The most hilarious thing of all is that he'd been wearing two pairs of ghandi's ALL DAY and never realized it (and we had made several bathroom stops) until 6:00 that night! Ha! Ha! Ha! He is SUCH A GOON!!!

We got home late Tuesday night. Yesterday was spent unloading the van... AGAIN. ~sigh~ I'm so tired of that!!! I just want to stay HOME for a while, you know? Spent the day getting unpacked and everything cleaned up, then I crawled (literally) to the back of the shed to retrieve the way-too-many boxes of Christmas stuff we have acquired. We got it ALL out and stacked it all over my office. I found the outdoor lights and climbed onto the roof and got them hung while James ran to Odessa to do our Thanksgiving shopping. (We usually plan better than this, but we've had way too much going on this year!) I fed and bathed our three smelly children, put them to bed, then started in on the Thanksgiving prep: deviled eggs, pea salad, frozen orange-pineapple punch, mandarine orange jell-o salad stuff, and pumpkin pies. I then drug out the Christmas greenery with lights and got busy stringing it at the ceiling line all around the living room. I HATE THAT JOB. That's why I did it last night. Just wanted to get it OVER with! It is such a pain to get it to stay up and not sag and not come crashing down. Took me 2 or 3 hours. Ggrrr.

This morning I started at 7:30 on the hot rolls. Had some time to watch a bit of the parade before going back to work in the kitchen, so that was nice. In the end, we had all of the above mentioned stuff, plus the turkey, stuffing, potatoes, gravy, sweet potatoes, and green bean casserole. Way, way, way too much of all of it. But that's how it's supposed to be, right?! Here's a picture James took before we dug in and messed up the purtiness of it all.


Katie in her best layered hobo look--with Hershey showing off his "good" ear. (I did some work on the bad one tonight, cutting out some matted hair and such from around the wound--he's going to look dumb for a good long while! Ha!)

Joe enjoying the snow

Santa Sam enjoying Thanksgiving dinner