thanksgiving & meet Santa

The girls and I have had a fairly calm few weeks. As for Alan, he seems to have a black cloud when it comes to being on-call because his past few weeks have been anything but calm. He has another run of call at Christmas (24th, 25th, 26th and 27th) so pray for us that he is not called in on Christmas morning therefore missing the first Christmas where the girls are "getting it" as far as presents and Santa are concerned. They are getting pretty excited about Christmas but still too young to understand the concept of time ... I think they are a little tired of waiting as we have all these decorations and presents and ... what?! ... we can't open them yet? The girls and Alan have been a little under the weather the past few days and I hope the bug continues to stay away from me! Alan is also trying to recover from running the Kiawah Island half-marathon this past weekend. We plan to stick around for Christmas due to Alan's call schedule as well as the fact that the new Finley family member should be here in a matter of weeks. It is a little exhausting to climb the stairs much less haul myself, a bunch of presents and two 2-year olds out of town on my own. It will be nice, though I will miss MY childhood Christmas routine, to begin to make Christmas traditions for my own kids. My family is coming here after Christmas for which I am so grateful! I can hardly wait to have everyone in the same room again! For Thanksgiving, Alan was off Thursday and Friday so we went to Sumter. We had a blast and the girls had so much fun playing with their cousins. I did not take nearly enough pictures!

Here are the girls on game day. I was nice to Alan and did not buy two Clemson shirts ... as he would say, at least one of our kids cheered on a winning team ... as I would say, there is always next year, right?

One of the few pictures I took at the Finley's ... the girls were happy to see their Dad and ran for hugs even though he was post-run sweaty ... they are braver than me!
The girls love to see and talk about their cousins Nick and Jackson. Both of the boys are so great with them! Nick was very patient and sat and read to Meredith for a long time ... it was too, too cute!

As the saying goes, most kids would rather play with the box the toys come in rather than the toys themselves ... just, in our case, the box REALLY needs to be big enough for two! This one worked just fine!

... as does our kitchen cabinet ... they love to play hide and seek and this is a favorite spot to hide ... I, of course, can NEVER find them though ;)

Another favorite new "game" is to bounce on Daddy's legs ... which I am sure is easier on Alan than the "jump on Daddy" which they used to love to do!

The past few weeks, the girls seem to have gotten closer and closer ... they often want "sissy" to kiss their "boo boos" as opposed to Mommy ... which is what is happening here ...

We decided the girls were old enough that we could chance putting up a Christmas Tree ... they have been told they can touch the ornaments but only with ONE finger ... and they are really very good about it!

I thought it had been a while since I posted a photo of myself ... so, here I am, in all my big belly glory ...

Anyone who knows about how this particular event went last year knows that a 50% improvement is not too bad ;) Meredith wasn't thrilled but she tolerated it ... Hannah was terrified. For fear of scarring her for life, I didn't even try to put her on Santa's lap but you can still see from the picture that she is about as close to me as she could get without morphing into my body ... which, most days, I think she would do if she could ...