This weekend...

seems to be all about Christmas.
Ryan keeps calling it my 'birthday weekend' (must be trying to make up for last year when we did nothing but grab dessert -albeit some of the best dessert ever from the Konditerei in Salem- and bring it home to sit in front of the tv. and yes that was my big three-oh.), but all that's on my mind is Christmas preparations. I actually keep forgetting tomorrow's my birthday.
We were supposed to go out tonight with the Huffs and the Barczaks. Three out of the six of us have the same birthday... Don, Nicole and I all have the birthdate of December 10th... isn't that crazy?! So we had -correction Ryan had taken the initiative and actually got the ball rolling with the other Ryan and Katie to (sort of) surprise us- made plans to go out for a nice dinner and maybe some bowling or something fun after that. Well, not entirely all the plans were taken care of, because even though my Ryan had called the one babysitter we know here in Jackson way ahead of time, when she was unavailable he kind of dropped the ball on lining up another one in a decent amount of time. To give him credit, he did call a couple other girls we got numbers for, but they were also unavailable and then we just kind of ran out of time. So we canceled our big night out, and here I sit blogging while Ryan is out picking up chinese food and a movie. Woo-hoo! Do we know how to celebrate, or what?!

Anyway, like I said, it seems all that's on my mind is Christmas stuff. I was actually feeling like going out tonight would be putting a cramp in my holiday busy time. If we were going out, I would have had to clean the house for the babysitter, had an actual dinner ready for the kids and would not have gotten half the things done today I did. We ran a bunch of errands for the first half of the day, got pretty much all of our Christmas shopping DONE (yay!!), I finished up my big I-don't-know-what-I'm-doing-project *see below, and got everything wrapped and organized to ship out first thing on Monday. That's 35 gifts in 5 packages and I think we did amazingly well on time, size and budget.






So here's my biggest project of the gifts. The one I felt clueless on. I had the idea just a few days before Thanksgiving and bought the canvas for it during the Black Friday sales. I really didn't give it another thought until I started working on it this past Thursday. I knew what colors I was doing to match Taegan's bedding and her room colors, but I had no clue what I wanted to do or how exactly I was putting it all together. So I just started playing around with the fabric paints and this is what happened. I think it turned out pretty stinkin' cute. I decided to go ahead and show it off here, as the Smith's are in Hawaii right now on their way home (to Portland) for Dan's settlement in court and probably won't be checking the blog anytime soon. They're going to be home for the holidays so the court dates turned out to be good timing. Anyway, even if they do happen to look here, I don't think it'll ruin the surprise for Taegen. Holly or Debbie, if she's on your lap when you read this, cover her eyes.

As I was trying to figure out attaching the dowels and how to hang it today, I asked Ryan what he thought of it. His reply was, "I think it looks pretty good considering you didn't know what you were doing." Um... thanks... I think.

The verse I did at the bottom is 2 Peter 3:18- "Grow in the grace and in the knowledge of our Lord."

Next up... I'm attempting to do one for my own kids. We'll see if that really happens before Christmas or not. Savannah must have asked me ten times today if I would measure her on Taegen's chart. I'm having second thoughts on whether I want to have one in my house for keeps...




p.s. Happy Birthday to Becky!!! Kind of weird to not be celebrating our birthdays together. Hope you have a fun weekend!