And all through the house, almost every child was sleeping, even Miss Erica Rose…

Okay, that’s the extent of my creativity for this hour.  Tonight has been so much fun.  I had been dreading Christmas since the day after Halloween when the radio started playing Christmas music.  I just felt so forced into the holiday so quickly.  But, now that it’s here I am just as pleased as pumpkin pie.

It really makes me appreciate our traditions.  Every Christmas Eve since Eric and I have been married we have went out for Chinese, and this year was no different.  The food was not all that great, but the company was wonderful.  All three of the girls were very well behaved. 

Afterwards we stopped by Walgreen’s to get those forgotten batteries to make those pesky battery operated toys work after they are opened.  Then a quick stop at Quick Trip for drinks and a cookie for Santa and a swing past the video store.  Eric picked up The Devil Wears Prada.  We were lucky to get that.  I really was hoping he would be able to get The Christmas Story, as we watch that every single Christmas but I couldn’t find our copy.  Oh well.  I’ll just look for it again tomorrow.  And I’m sure we can find it on TV somewhere.

When we got back home we opened family presents.  It was a much smaller Christmas than usual, but Ally said it was her favorite Christmas so far.  That made us feel a lot better.  One thing we did that seem to make it seem bigger is the girls got to only open one gift at a time, throw their wrapping paper away in between and couldn’t open another one until they were all three on the same page.

I made this beautiful box for Eric for Christmas that had a little album in there with our Springfield Trip pictures.  He absolutely loved it.  I have to honestly admit I expected a lot more oohing and awing.  But, he did display it on the mantel, so I’m sure I’m just being extremely sensitive.

Now we are just waiting the girls out so we can stuff the stockings and put Santa’s presents under the tree.  Erica fell quickly to sleep thanks to the magic of Benadryl.  Don’t worry, we didn’t just give it to her because we wanted her to sleep.  She has been having some pretty bad allergy stuff going on the last couple of days.  Poor little thing is all red, teary eyed in all her pictures.  Hopefully tomorrow she’ll be feeling better.  Jackie and Ally are still awake upstairs.  Turns out Jackie can hear everything being said down here.  So if there was any doubt in if whether or not she believed in Santa, there’s very little now.

Well, it’s off to watch a movie with Eric and then play Santa!  Merry Christmas to all, and to all a good night! 

I just barely got back from meeting a bunch of friends for All You Can Eat Crab Buffet at Argosy.  And I think I did a good job of taking that to heart.  Argosy definitely did not make money off of me tonight.  I piled my plate with about 6 sets of legs, probably the equivalent of 3 crabs, cracked them all and then ate all the meat at once.  Oh it was so good.  Now I’m good for a couple of months.

As if the crab wasn’t enough, I went ape wild on the dessert bar.  I could have easily sampled one of everything.  My favorite was the chocolate cup filled with chocolate mousse, topped with a dash of raspberry. Oh my goodness.  They were rich, but they were totally to die for.

Now I’m contemplating between going straight to bed now or convincing Eric that we need to quickly clean our room.  After battling the computer half the night and then getting up earlier than usual this morning the sleepy side of me is really wanting to take over.  However, the organizing side of me might win unless Eric gives me a good argument over why we should just go to bed now.  We’ll see shortly which side will win.

Good night!

Okay, thought I would come down here around 10:00pm and post to my blog.  Well, I get down here only to find my computer is STILL shutting down from 2:00pm!  So, against his will Eric finally just turns off the power without it finishing it’s updates.  I’m thinking I would have been better off listening to him.  I turn the computer back on only to have no sound and no microphone anymore.

So, trying to be the helpful wife that I am, I think to myself maybe I should just reinstall the software for the sound card.  Nope!  I just turned the whole thing into the nightmare!  Needless to say, it’s now 2:00am and I still have no sound.  Gggrrrr!  Eric finally gave up.  Then to make matters even more fun, the internet is soooooooo slow tonight.

Besides that little incident, my day did go okay.  In spite of 5 1/2 hours of sleep.  Erica would not fall asleep for us until 2:00am!  Then I got a call that woke me up at 7:30am, I’m not naming names though.  Let’s just say in spite of that, I would still call her a friend. 

I met up with Sara at Stamper’s Ink and we both sleepily took their card class.  It was way awesome.  Loved it!  The owner gave us a little peek into next month’s classes, and needless to say I might have to temporarily take out a loan and take up residence in Shawnee Mission.  I am just loving learning all of these new techniques.

I TRIED to take a nap when I got home but didn’t get much sleep.  Eric was in the middle of backing up his laptop in our room and Erica flat out refused to take a nap.  Probably had something to do with the fact that she got at least her 10 hours of sleep.  I finally gave up in time to eat Chinese that Sandy so graciously brought us home. 

After dinner I decided enough was enough and we were going to get the tree and some decorations up.  So we worked together and got it all done and put away.  I told Eric when it’s time to take everything down I’ll save him a trip up to the attic and just buy more plastic tubs to put everything in.  He actually went for it.

Well, I am exhausted and tomorrow will be another early day.  And then tomorrow night is our long awaited COF Crab Leg Buffet at the Argosy Casino.  That poor casino is not going to know what hit them when I get there.  Crab legs is one of my all time favorite foods and I don’t get it that often.  I’d have to say it holds an even dearer place in my heart than chocolate.  And let me tell you, that’s saying quite a bit!

I’ve tried to upload a picture of our tree now for over 15 minutes.  I give up.  Sleep is slightly more important to me at this point.  Hopefully the internet will be working better tomorrow and I’ll post the picture then.  I’ll just be greatful if this posts. 

I’d rather be here on my computer right now.  If I’m staring at the screen then the laundry doesn’t exist right?

I actually made it to bed early for me.  Ended up sleeping almost 12 hours last night!  Felt so much better after I woke up. 

Erica ended up spending most of the day running around with me today.  Christy and Brandi wanted to go to Subway for lunch today and invited Erica and myself to go with them.  They had coupons after all, so we counted our money and agreed.

Well, we get to Subway and apparently in the fine print it says it’s valid after 3pm.  Oops.  But ended up making out just as well with their daily meal deal.  It’s been so long since I’ve eaten Subway.

Ever since last night’s ornament exchange, Christy got a bug up her bum and wanted to make something similar to what Pam had made which involves Soldering.  So we went to Urban Arts & Crafts (which has some really cool stuff), Joann’s and Hobby Lobby looking for supplies.  I’m a little afraid to get into this as I’m the type of person that when I get into something, I fully throw myself into it.  And this is going to be an expensive thing to get into.  Maybe once the holidays have passed, I might do it.

After we got home I actually made dinner tonight.  Nothing fancy, Stouffer’s Lasagna.  So yummy though.  But you figure if it’s made by Nestle, it kind of has to.  I really cleaned the kitchen during the whole time it was baking.  Didn’t get to the floors or pantry though.  And I even baked up a batch of cookies.  Before anyone starts applauding, it was premade cookie dough.  But I did have to spoon it out onto the cookie sheet. 

After dinner and dishes (again) I sat down with Ally and took a fine tooth comb through her backpack.  That is one of the most important things I’ve been neglecting quite a bit is keeping up on school stuff.  I’ve kind of pawned that off onto Eric for about a year or more now and it’s so not fair of me with everything else he has going on trying to provide a living for his family.  I’m back in the game now. 

I used to be so good at all of that stuff.  Cooking, cleaning, organizing, making files for the girl’s papers and communication from school, the whole bit.  I was so anal that I even scheduled what days and time I mopped the floor all the way down to what load of laundry was hitting the dryer on what day.  Whatever happened to those days?  I think I need to spend some time after the holidays sitting down and reorganizing myself.  I know I felt like I had more of a purpose when I was up on all of that.  Now you can hardly walk through my room!  Yikes!

It’s 10:43, and I’m signing off the computer for the night and am going to FORCE myself to leave this room and go upstairs and spend a little bit of time with Eric and Erica and be in bed by midnight.  Then I’ll dream sweet dreams of the card class I’m taking with Sara tomorrow morning at Stamper’s, Ink.  Good night!

It was finally the evening of the Circle Of Friends Christmas Party!  I made a cake from scratch from the magazine everyone was cooking from and it turned out okay.  I think it would have been less expensive to just go buy one.  But everyone’s food was soooo yummy!

We had so much fun!  It has been so long since I’ve laughed so hard.  We had an ornament exchange via the Chinese Christmas exchange where you can steal from each other.  I would have not been disappointed with a single one of those ornaments.  We have such a group of talented women within our circle.

Christy’s ornament brought the most smiles to everyone’s face.  Molly opened it up and pulled it out and it was a little misshapen.  As she continued to hold it up it literally just fell apart.  It was the most comical part of the evening.  Tempie actually ended up trading for it in the end, which was awfully sweet of her.  With all joking aside, Christy’s ornament was actually pretty cute.  It’s hard to say which was my favorite.

We played our theme song for everyone and it was agreed that it was so perfect for our group.  It’s “Circle Of Friends” by Point Of Grace.

It was just so great to have as many of us as possible together again and enjoy each other’s company, creativity and laughter. 

After organizing my desk and files I told the girls that if they got their rooms and playroom cleaned that we would go take them to see Santa.  After Eric got on them for hours and caught them watching TV I sent the two older girls running and then gave them a half an hour to clean them.  To my amazement they cleaned their rooms beautifully!  I told Erica that if she got the playroom cleaned that she could go see Santa.

Would you believe it?  That little 3 year old cleaned that entire room!  And believe me, it was a mess!  Now granted it wasn’t up to my standards, but for her age, I was totally impressed.  She had everything off the floor, which really was the most important part to me.  Random things were thrown in the stuffed animal box, nothing made it back on the shelves and everything that was on the floor ended up on the table, desk, chairs and couch.  But I was super impressed.

So, I remember the mall fiasco from last year and the year before where we took the girls to go see Santa, but you were not allowed to take pictures with your own camera.  To me that is so wrong!  That’s something the mall’s should provide as a service to draw you in to shop there.  What happened to the days where you could snap to your hearts content while your child told Santa what they wanted for Christmas?  So, I called around the malls in the area and asked.  Great Plains Mall told me we would be allowed to take our own pictures.  Wrong.

We get there and there are maybe, maybe 10 families in line.  There are no signs anywhere that say you aren’t permitted to take your own pictures.  It takes us almost an HOUR to get to the front of the line.  The lady asks us if we want to buy pictures or are they just there to see Santa.  We ask if we can take our own pictures.  Only if we are buying pictures first.  Okay, how much is your cheapest package?  Fourteen Dollars!!  That gets you one sheet of pictures.  You times that by 3 kids, I don’t think so!  But she does go on to say that they can’t do anything if I take my pictures outside the fence.

So, I stand outside of the fence and take the best across the football shot as I can of Ally.  Didn’t turn out half bad.  Well the other lady running the pictures notices that I’m taking my own pictures just before Erica sits on Santa’s lap, now mind you this is the FIRST year that Erica actually ended up sitting on Santa’s lap.  Well the lady sees it and steps directly in front of me and Erica and there was no way I was going to get a clear shot.  Then Jackie’s up and she is beautifully posed on Santa’s lap, probably for the last year.  This lady could not have been more in my way if she tried!

I thought I was going to leap over the fence and strangle this lady!  But anyway, when did it happen that Santa became a cash cow?  When did it become so terrible to take good pictures of your own children?  I think I might have been willing to buy pictures if they were more reasonable and they actually turned out looking half way decent.  I don’t know.  It’s a soapbox I’ve gotten on for three Christmases now.  It makes me so angry that I would rather just spend my money online.  It does nothing to make me want to flock to the malls at Christmas and spend a dime there.  Which by the way, is exactly what we did tonight.

It’s so terrible that I’m focusing on such a small portion of my evening.  It really turned out quite nice.  I enjoyed spending that time out of the house with my family.  Even though I didn’t get all that great of a picture, it was still very nice to see my baby Erica willingly sit on Santa’s lap.  And when I got home, Christy called me on my computer and told me Jessica was heading back into town tonight.  So we managed to get Jessica in on a conference call and chatted for hours.  It was such a wonderful end to my evening.  I can’t wait to see everyone at the COF Christmas Party. 

Jackie & Santa:

Ally & Santa:

Erica & Santa:

Do you ever have one of those days that when you get done with it you wonder what on earth did I do today?  That would pretty much describe me right now.

I went to Office Max to get some rings for a project that I’m working on that will be Eric’s Christmas present.  Then I went up to Hobby Lobby to stock up on brushes.  They have this big bag of 50 foam brushes for $4.00 and I was planning on using my 40% coupon which would have made it an even awesome deal.

Of course I also had to pick up brushes and a Krylon gold paint pen to go with my new inks and mica powder that I bought last night.  Never know when I might break the seal on all of those goodies and do something with it. 

You would never believe where I went after that…Yep, Christy’s house.  Still did not see her brand new Tahoe.    Oh well, maybe she’ll trust me enough one day to show it to me.  I helped her work on some stuff.  Then we worked on the party for Sunday a little bit (I think we have everything all finalized), then went shopping for some surprises and then met Karen, Diane and Vickie at Pizza Hut.

Normally I eat so much pizza I have it coming out my ears, but I was really craving it tonight!  We sat there for 3 hours talking!  I so look forward to getting together whenever possible and just hanging out and talking.

I did come home to a pleasant surprise!  Eric bought and installed a sound card in my computer and hooked up a set of earphones/microphone so now I can talk to my friends through Skype through the computer.  It’s even better than talking on the phone!  It’s totally free and is so quick and easy to download.  For anyone that wants to call me through that, my username is christina.graham1.

Tomorrow I plan on trying to get some laundry done, run to Joann’s and Hobby Lobby to pick up some more things I need to make Christmas presents and then come back home and work on them.  It should be a nice relaxing day.  If I could run to the stores in my pajamas, it would be even nicer.

Today was so much fun.  I actually committed to Christy’s challenge she issued last night and was out my door by 9:30am this morning.  We had breakfast at IHOP.  It was kind of fun having breakfast at breakfast time!  Afterwards we went back to her COF Studio and I finished my ornament and started working on something I think I’m going to give Eric for Christmas.

After Christy’s I met up with Sara tonight for a Stamping 102 class at Stampers, Ink.  I learned so many new techniques!  The owner asked how long we’d been stamping…  Well, I’ve stamped on a couple pages and some cards with a rubber stamp and ink.  I’ve even embossed a few times.  So, like a dork, I told her a year, year and a half.  I quickly found out there is waaaaaay more to stamping than what I knew.

I was so amazed at how much I learned tonight.  I pretty much blew the rest of my scrapbooking budget through the 15th.  But that’s okay.  I now have added colorwash, mica powder and gold glaze to my scrapbooking arsenal.  I can hardly wait to play with it some more!  Oh and I also signed up for two more classes.  It’s a drive, but it is so worth it.  I’m ready to start adding some more exciting techniques into my scrapbooking and cardmaking.

This was the first class I took since the stores closed.  It was so strange!  And of course someone tried to bring it up tonight, but Sara, without missing a beat spoke right up and said, “I just want to say right now, there are actually some SD people here.”  It pretty much shut the whole thing up.  Bless that Sara.  I just love how outspoken she is but does it in a way that doesn’t put down people. 

Well, I’m off to make my nightly cruise through the blogs, check my email and spend some time with Eric and Erica.  I’m sure they are both still awake.  I miss that little monkey of mine when I’m gone all day like today.  Until tomorrow….

Another great day!  Didn’t have to deal with the bank at all today.  Hopefully those days are behind us now. 

I started my day out by running out to Mr Goodcents for “brunch” before going over to Christy’s house to help her and some of her neighborhood friends cut fleece for pillows that their classes are doing for their craft project for their Christmas parties.

We then ran by the house and picked up Erica and Ally since Eric had a very important phone call to make.  Took them shopping with us to Archiver’s and Hobby Lobby.  Christy did make it into Hobby Lobby, but not so much with Archiver’s.  I think I would have died from shock if she had ventured in there.

I picked up the Basic Grey Ornament kits, some paper and die cuts from the BG Fruitcake line, BG chipboard hardware and of course fiber that matches it all.  Figure I’ll try to make something with some of that for Christmas.  I about passed out when I heard my total.

Bought 4 rolls of Christmas wrapping paper at Hobby Lobby.  All their Christmas stuff was 50% off!  Which brought the paper to $3.00 a roll.  And these weren’t tiny rolls either.  They had 100 square feet on them.  When I wrap presents, I wrap each of the kids in different wrapping paper and then everyone else’s in the same.  Still need to get paper for Santa to wrap his presents with, but couldn’t do that with the girls with me.  I think Ally has caught on to the whole Santa thing, but hasn’t admitted to it yet.  Of course Erica is just getting into the whole thing this year.  It’s so exciting to see her so excited about it all.

After we were finished shopping, I swung back past the house to drop them off and enjoy a few moments of silence.  Then we went back to Christy’s house ( ), grabbed a bite to eat for dinner and started working on our ornaments for the Circle of Friends Christmas Party Ornament Exchange.   Mine ended up being a lot harder to put together than I imagined, but Christy figured it out for me.

Part way through the process though, Diane called Christy’s computer and had some girls over at her house that wanted to say hi to her.  As soon as Vicki said hi, Christy excitedly jumped out of her seat pulling her cord out of the computer and hanging up on her.  It had been so long since she had heard from those girls and it meant so much to her to hear their voices. 

Well, Christy couldn’t figure out how to get her microphone to work (let’s just say when the volume is turned all the way down, it has a tendency to not work so well), so we ran over to Diane’s house to visit with them.  It was so great seeing those girls.

After over two hours we decided it was time to start towards home.  So a quick trip past QuickTrip ( ) for gas and hot dogs and then back to Christy’s where I picked up my car and snuck in my house.  I can’t believe no one heard me come in through the garage!  Oh well, it’s so nice and quiet down here I’m just really enjoying it. 

Better not enjoy it for too long because Christy and I are supposed to finish our ornaments and work on stuff for the party and decided to get an early start.  So, I told her I’d be back in the morning by 9:30am.  Well, I just saw that she doesn’t quite believe me in her blog entry for today, so now it’s a challenge…

Does anyone else have a brain fart when they go to title their Blog posts?  I feel like I should come up with something catchy.  But, obviously looking back I don’t do too well with that.  Oh well, I figure the most important part of my blog is just getting my day down in words.

I actually got some laundry done this morning.  Now I’m not going to lie to you, it was only because I was out of clothes.  We went to the bank to try to make a deposit in our account only to find out we were still having issues with the bank!  Hopefully within the next couple of days those will finally be ironed out once and for all.  And PVB if you have nothing better to do than stumble across my blog, we are without a doubt switching our accounts to another bank within the very near future.

After a trip to the bank and then to Walmart, I figured today was just as good as any to pick a fight with Eric.    Without going into a long, drawn-out, bore you to tears story there was basically an apple pie thrown into the crease of our front window, a package of moist wipes refills out the window on Roanridge and then the pie in the window thrown onto I29.  Pretty much Christina threw herself a big ol’ temper tantrum that was shortly thereafter followed by buckets of tears.

After Eric and I finally made up, I ran over to Christy’s and picked her up.  I really wanted to go to Michael’s to pick up a pencil box (the cardboard ones), and managed to convince Christy to come with me!  First we stopped by Joann’s just in case they might have them there.  Nope. 

Then after turning up empty handed at Michael’s we went to Margarita’s for Tacos!  So, so good!  And on Tuesday’s, so, so cheap!

Christy and I are throwing a Christmas party for some of our friends, so after dinner we went back to her house and started working on some surprises for Sunday night.  I have to say they turned out pretty cute.  Tomorrow we are going to work on our ornaments for the ornament exchange.  Can’t wait to see what I come up with that.

Well, it’s now well into tomorrow so that means it’s time for me to try to get to bed.  I just pray that Eric’s Mom didn’t get Erica down for a nap at something like 6pm.  Not that I don’t appreciate her efforts, it’s just that she thinks she’s ready to party all night long when she naps so late in the day.

Goodnight!