ho ho no

Things have been a little crazy around here.  We bought a house which I am so excited about and tired from at the same time.  The past several weeks (or months, really) have been spent on the phone arranging for utilities to be turned on an inspections to be completed, printing, signing, scanning, and emailing mortgage papers, dusting, scrubbing, and cleaning, and finally, painting.

Get out your red pen to correct the punctuation in that sentence.  I may be a grammar snob but punctuation is just not my forte and I absolutely hate commas.

So much work and effort has gone into getting ready to move into this house that I have pretty much neglected everything else.  I have been lucky enough to have a mom down the street (not literally unfortunately) who will step in as temporary Mom to Katelyn while I work.  I have spent the last two weeks as a paint covered zombie and not much else.

I will definitely post some pictures of the house and blog all about it soon.  We ran out of moving boxes and packed all of our clothes in trash bags.  Right now, the bedroom looks like a cloth tornado ran right through it.  Seriously.  If we had invited Edward Scissorhands over to our house and told him to go crazy with the bags of clothing, it could not look much worse.  Nobody needs to see that.

For now, let me just talk about last night.

Last week, I decided that it was time to take a break from the house and just have a weekend of family fun.  Dave took Monday and Tuesday off from work and we planned on relaxing together.  At the same time, I decided that we needed to get out more as a family and take advantage of the exciting events our community has to offer.

I'm not sure what it was about nesting in our new home that made me feel so zealous in taking on a weekend family adventure.

I had heard that there was a free Christmas event at the Galleria in uptown Houston.  There was to be music and signing and a tree lighting ceremony and an ice skating Santa.

I'll let you guess what I was the most excited about.

If you didn't say "ice skating Santa" then we need to get to know each other better.

Anyway, I thought this would be perfect.  The event started at 6:00.  We left the house at 5:00.  Kate was buckled in the back seat with a french braid in her freshly washed hair.  We got to the Galleria at 6:00.  Kate was still buckled in the back seat slumped over to the side with a bottle hanging out of her mouth.  She had taken the rubber band from her hair to use as a bracelet.  I don't know how she does that.  We finally found the entrance to the "free" parking at 6:15.  Don't believe the signs.  We spent forever trying to find the elusive "free parking" only to be greeted with this sign.

We circled the "free" parking lot until 6:45.  Kate was still buckled in the back seat but, by this time, she was desperately trying to unbuckle herself to get out.  We got back onto the freeway by 7:00.  Tired and hungry, Kate had given up trying to free herself and began using her energy to scream instead.

We finally made it to our local First Colony Mall by 7:15.  (Thankfully, the southbound traffic was much lighter.)  We strapped Kate into the stroller, did a fast paced walk by the Santa stand (just to say that we saw Santa), and ran to the food court for a cookie and a Diet Coke.

(Only we didn't get a Diet Coke because she mall McDonald's charges forty five cents for a refill and it's not that forty five cents is that much but it goes against my principles.)

We let Kate roam around in the indoor playground.  Most of the time, she had free range of the equipment because she was the only baby.  All the other responsible parents didn't attempt the trek to the Galleria and had put their children to bed, I guess.  We sat there beaten and tired while Kate wandered around aimlessly for a while and then we left.

And that was our family fun Saturday.

And Kate didn't even sleep in this morning.

I'm not going to be totally negative.  We did have a lot of fun in the car.  We got to just sit and talk and listen to music.  We heard Katy Perry's Roar at least five times which is unequivocally Katelyn's favorite song of all time.  We did get to enjoy a few Double Doozie cookies.  And even though he wasn't on ice skates, we technically did see Santa.

But it was definitely enough excitement.  So this afternoon, I am staying glued to this chair watching all the Lifetime Christmas movies I have recorded on my parents' TV.

I know it's November.

I don't even care.