Advent Monday

~Welcome Home!  We were away for Thanksgiving, from Tuesday to Saturday.  We drove up to Virginia to see dh's family.  As always, it's fun to be with the many cousins and inlaws.  It's a big party! We try to drive it on "off" days so we don't hit the bad traffic, and it seemed to work well this year.  In fact, we made it home an hour faster than normal.  Yeah!

~Outside: it's rainy.  It's supposed to rain heavily all day and cool down dramatically.  We might even get snow tonight!  But we know better than to be excited about it:  it has been so warm, in the high 60's all week, that nothing could possibly stick to the ground.

~Inside:  We have some Advent decorations out.  Advent wreath on the door, and one on the dining room and kitchen tables.  Nativities are out; Santa's are out; stockings are hung.  And I have my buffet decorated with all my milk glass, red berries, and holly sprigs.  I like that.

I don't know why the kids don't like to help with the decorating (or do I???), but they were playing with friends yesterday, and I got just a little help from Katie.  There's So. Much. Stuff. in my "Christmas Closet"!  We decided to trim it down a bit this year, and we have a bag of stuff already to go to Goodwill today.

~Gus Update:  We left him with generous neighbors who are very sweet, and probably have a higher tolerance for dog misbehavior than we do.  They got along fine with him, and he seems a little calmer since we got back.  He grew noticeably, even his whiskers!

We haven't put up our Jesse Tree yet because we're undecided about what to do.  We had planned to use it on a table this year as our Jesse/Christmas tree because we didn't think we could trust him.  Wouldn't you know that the folks we left him with did all their decorating on Friday and he didn't bother their tree at all!

Well, I wasn't up to the task of getting it out yesterday, anyway.  Christmas decorating is a big enough job.  Combining it with coming home from a trip and doing a week's worth of laundry for eight people with a limping dryer is just more than I could bear.

~The Liturgy:  I was so excited for the beginning of Advent and the new Mass translation, yesterday.  It was a bit awkward with people practically shouting "And With Your Spirit!" to make sure we got it right.  I think everyone missed the one at the Gospel reading!  The rest went well.  However, the beauty of the new translation was lost in all the other stuff that bothers me at my parish these days.  Dh went to a different parish, later, because Meg is sick and he stayed with her while I went to sing and the boys to serve the altar.

~Knitting:  I got lots of knitting done on my gray sweater over Thanksgiving, but not as much as I would have liked.  It's going to have to take a backseat now while I work on the sleeping mat for the homeless!

~I'm so happy to be home!  There's nothing like sleeping in your own bed---though I've discovered that I can sleep well on a sleep sofa if my back is already in good shape because of the chiropractor!  Back in the days when my back was in really bad shape, those things were miserable!!!!!

It's time to get Pip up and ready for school, though Meg will be sick on the sofa all day with a fever and sore throat.  There's lots to be done today---is there ever not?