Thanksgiving

Happy belated Thanksgiving to all of you. I hope you had a great holiday. I know I did.

My family all managed to make it down, although not all at the same time. My dad was the first arrival on Sunday, having driven from Minnesota. Rather than let him enjoy a relaxing vacation, we put him to work and he painted our dining room/kitchen and the baby's nursery between Monday and Wednesday. It looks gorgeous, and I'll try to remember to post pictures at some point. It's such a relief to have this stuff done. I had torn all the wallpaper down over the course of the previous year, only to find plaster walls underneath that were in terrible condition. I then started taping the room in April so I could paint, having taken pictures of the walls to Sherwin Williams and finding out we'd have to use oil-based primer first. The goal was to start painting after graduation. Well, that was also the time we found out I was pregnant and thus couldn't be around oil primer. So I've been staring at ugly terrible walls for over a year, and partially taped room for about 8 months. Now it's all painted and great looking and we put up a bunch of framed artwork that we've had wrapped in brown paper and sitting in storage for almost 2 years now. (For those wondering, I worked Monday and Tuesday, so I wasn't home around the fumes during the painting).

Then on Monday, since Tom had to work, my dad and I went to VegiTerranean, a vegetarian restaurant owned and operated by Chrissie Hynde of the Pretenders. It was very cool, good food, and it was great to spend some one-on-one time with my dad. My mom flew in Tuesday evening and the four of us all went out to dinner, which was very nice. Rick and Emily drove in Wednesday night, so we were all finally together. It was wonderful having the whole group here. We cooked Thanksgiving dinner on Thursday and then Tom managed to get the night off from work, so we ended up being able to sit around and relax together. Then this morning we went out to breakfast, and by 12:30, everyone had left. Even though we got to spend a lot of time together, it seemed to go by very quickly.

So anyway, that was my week in brief. Today I started getting Christmas decorations up, including our tree. However, I just realized it's crooked, but I think I'll wait for Tom to get up before trying to correct it. I think it was ok at first, but then I got under there to put the skirt around the bottom and the dogs decided to go under with me and we may have knocked it off balance at that point. Oops. :) I'm very excited to think that next Christmas we'll have a baby to share the holiday with, wherever we end up. Oh yeah, last piece of news - my applications are all complete for grad school, so now we just play the waiting game until February. I applied to the U of MN, Madison, and the U of Chicago. I think you can all guess what my first choice is, so keep your fingers crossed for us!