The holidays are coming fast!

Christmas time is coming fast already. The day after Halloween, they already were putting up their Christmas displays at the grocery store. I'm excited for Christmas too, but come on. Only good thing about it all right now with the holidays coming is that I LOVE Thanksgiving, and the stores are having all their specials for Turkey, stuffing, pumpkin pie, and all the other T-day goodies. Thanksgiving is the best meal of the year. The meal I eat as much as I want, and don't care about the calories. Screw the whole concept of only eating a little bit and eating healthy through the holidays. I eat and enjoy myself for one time period the entire year. If only I could get rid of my elyptical machine and get a treadmill in it's place soon, since I've realized that as much as I'd like to go to my local track and run there, it's just more time that it takes, and how more convenient it would be to have another treadmill again. Any way, back to Christmas thinking...I used to always tell B that we couldn't put up any Christmas stuff until the day after Thanksgiving, because I want to celebrate that holiday first, then focus on Christmas. This season though, it seems like time is flying by so fast that I can't catch my breath. Seems like every year, we have to buy for more and more people too. I wish I could cut out all the material gift buying except for only the kids and Belinda too. Bring things back to the original meaning of Christmas, and just do a bunch of fun activities to focus on Jesus' birth.

At work, a few of us decided to start a weekly bible study, and opened it up to the entire staff, but we made it voluntary. To my surprise, out of about 40 people on staff, only around eight come each week. I don't get that at all. Any way, we're doing a book called "He Shall Be Called..." The book is a collection of 150 names that Jesus is called in the Bible. The author says there are over 300, but that these are the prominent 150 that he decided to do for the book. When we get together, usually one of three people kind of go over the chapter we decided to do for the week, and then we discuss anything that pops up while reading. A lot of time, the names are referring to Old Testament so far, and so that's been a big focus on discussion. There are two women in the group who are Old Testament gurus it seems, because they pull out information from their brain that you know they had to have dug to research and find out. It's actually really amazing to sit and listen to them each week. So much so that I wish B was there so much to learn with me, that I'm going to start using my Zen and record each week's discussion for her. Hopefully she'll want to hear it. I might find a hosting site for free on the web, and upload some of them for any of you that want to hear it. Let me know if anyone would be interested in that.

Braden just woke up. It's 6:45am...5 minutes before A's alarm goes off. Braden is such a morning person that it's hard to say he's our child! HA! Jaelyn is the polar opposite. Avery gets up, but he focuses on getting up and getting ready, then waking up. He does pretty well. Jaelyn has a routine we started for her to help her have better, more organized, mornings. She gets up and has 15 minutes to wake up and put her clothes on, then 15 minutes to eat and brush her teeth, then another 15 minutes to put her shoes/socks on, and brush her hair. I think the organization is helping her mornings have more structure, which then makes it easier for her to know what she needs to do, how she is doing time-wise, and to know what she has left as she progresses through each step. Well, it's time to get the kids up, so that means time to start some breakfast and make me some coffee (got me some pumpkin spice creamer at Kroger last week!!! RAWK!!!). I think I'll make them eggs this morning. That sounds good.

Hope you all have a blessed day. Make the time to brighten someone else's day.

God Bless,
E