Tis the season

We have found some holiday cheer and some stress to go with it. I think everything is just slower here, took longer to get here. Now, it feels as if the holiday has sprung upon me. All of a sudden I have a million things to do. Clean, wrap, pack, decorate, oh and of course bake. The house is feeling pretty festive. Our first Christmas here will include my parents, my sister, her partner, and my grandmother...plus the 7 of us makes for a full house. Tonight, we will venture to a holiday festival filled with lights and a village with Santa. We did go see the local Santa in town last weekend. Good God, was he bad. Jeans under his clothes and a horrible fake beard. It was quite the disappointment. Also, last weekend we had our potential new friends over for dinner. It went rather well. She shares some of my zombie apocalypse view points, which was fun to discuss. The children got along wonderfully. They even helped clean up when it was time to go which is a huge point maker in my eyes. I took #2 and #3 over to her house on Tuesday to make Christmas cookies. They live about 40 minutes away. In country space, I think that's pretty close. It was an interesting experience. I was a little nervous. When we arrived it took about 45 minutes for their dogs to stop barking incessantly at me. It was annoying but apparently they get very few visitors and the dogs weren't sure how to act. We made some cookies, chatted, and she showed me a lot of her homeschooling material. Her passion for homeschool is inspiring. They had a pair of pet rats which we held and played with. After I put one back in the cage, I leaned forward to make kissy noises at him, because I'm a genius. Who'd a thunk... that sucker bite me right in the nose. It took me awhile to get the bleeding to stop. I wanted to leave right away at that point but I stuck it out another 20minutes or so. I left her house rocking a red transformers Band-Aid across my nose. I looked like Rudolf. Tis the Season!!!