Dentist, Snow, & Maleficent

It's been a long week, but we made it through.  We had dentist appointments Monday.  My sister is our dentist, and so the kids love going there.  Laura had another filling, but she loves getting them, which is a blessing.  For some reason, her teeth didn't form real well, so she has had quite a bit of dental work for her age.  I'm thankful she's not one of those kids that has anxienty at the dentist.  Hannah did really well too.  She just had a cleaning.  Next round, Emma gets to join us!  That ought to be interesting.  Emma is my defiant one and likely will not sit in the chair and follow directions.  We'll find out in June!  That wasn't all for Monday.  Monday started out a little unusual for November 17th - we got about 4 inches of snow!  And it was freezing cold.  So schools were delayed, which throws a wrench in our schedules.  Juggling schedules is the hardest part about working and having kids.  Whether it's Christmas/Spring breaks, summer break, illnesses, school volunteering, or weather related, moving work schedules around is painful.  It is definitely one of those burdens of working mothers.  I am very blessed that my parents now live close and are willing to help us out in those scenarios whenever possible.  In fact this time, my mom came down and spent the night, which was awesome!  So that is what we did Monday morning - juggled schedules to accomodate Laura's 2 hour delay.  I always feel bad for her on those days because our school does not serve lunch when they have a 2 hour delay.  We are to pack a snack for them to eat in the classroom.  That's a long time to wait to eat.  I try to pack her a heavy snack.  She had a cereal bar, apples and veggies.  It was a quasi-lunch.

Speaking of motherhood, Momnipotent started Tuesday night at our parish.  I am participating in this study group at church with one of my besties, Syd!  It is a group that will discuss embracing our feminine strengths, motherhood, and our faith.  I'm really excited to be participating in it, and I'm really excited to see Kara for eight weeks!!  Unfortunately in the throws of motherhood, often women our age lose track of our friends because life just gets so busy and overwhelming and we need to be reminded that those friendships are important.  They are important for our health, and they are important for our humanity. 

Wednesday and Thursday felt like catch-up days.  The evenings were busy with work and homework, but nothing overly exciting.  And then Friday finally was here, and it was sweet relief.  I made another recipe from the best cookbook, Southern Living's Easy Weeknight Favorites.  It was the ham and grits crust-less quiche.  It was sooo good!  I don't think the kids loved it, but they really only like plain things, and this had lots of good flavor.  I think I'm going to add spinach to it next time.  Then we watched Maleficent with the kids.  They loved it!  I wasn't sure at first, but it was a pretty good movie.  The two littles put on some Christmas jammies, and they were so cute! 

Speaking of Christmas, if you haven't been able to gather from recent posts, Matt and I are exceedingly excited for Christmas this year.  We have been budgeting and making lists and planning for the kids.  Every year we have consistently went overboard on the kids.  I would really like to scale back this year and to emphasize the real meaning of Christmas and focus on making memories.  But I'm not sure that Matt can do it.  He gets great enjoyment out of spoiling them on Christmas.  So we will see.  Kendra Tierney at CatholicAllYear had a good post about limiting toys for kids yesterday that I appreciated.  Although our situation is slightly different in that our kids are not "toy-trend sheltered."  They are in school and daycare and therefore are exposed to all the new toys.  So what do you all do at Christmas?  Do you limit toys, or do you go all out? 

Next week is Thanksgiving week!  And also Beat M*ch*gan week!  I won't go into why I hate that those two weeks coincide.  That would be a whole blog post to itself.  Nevertheless, it will be an awesome week.  And then into the Christmas season!!!