bring on the holidays

I feel like I've been so out of the loop without my normal blogging. For all of last week, I steered mostly clear of my usual rambling on about our days and our ups and downs to share thoughts about the things I'm really thankful for in my life. And then this whole weekend with our trip and coming home to a million things needing to be done, I just haven't been in blogging mode. I had to make myself post tonight.

We were bad and skipped church today. I feel myself getting into this slump again that I remember from last year. I'm just feeling so burnt out on trying so many different churches, and there's something extra lonely about approaching the holidays with out a church family "base" to look forward to with the special celebrations and ministries if this season.
We went back to a church that we had gone to for a few weeks earlier this summer. We decided that we liked it well enough to give it a try for a few more weeks. But after those few more weeks we've realized again that that's probably not where we're supposed to be. So we're back to square one. I had high hopes that after this second move that we'd find a church family much quicker this time, but this is turning out to be the same timeline of our church hunting last year... just hopefully not ending up in the same place of never really finding it like in MI.

Anyway, we skipped church this morning and went Christmas shopping instead. We headed back over to my new favorite mall and got quite a bit accomplished. It was a long few hours, but I crossed quite a bit off of my list. Feels good. I'm feeling quite on top of things this year. I'm making quite a few handmade gifts this year, but they are all already pretty much finished up. I have the majority of the other gifts bought, or at least I know what I'm looking for so it's not a feeling of oh no I have to get that done. And we got our Christmas cards out of the way early. I love to make our cards every year and I usually leave them (even the figuring out what exactly it is that I'm making part) for the last possible minute, meaning we have a couple of evenings of assembly line card making crammed in with getting gifts and projects and wrapping finished up. This year I decided to get them done early... I figured since we never got out our annual family letter this year or any change of address cards or anything, I should send my Christmas cards out on the early side so friends and family would have our new address. So we finished them up before Thanksgiving and had them in the mailbox on Friday. I'm hoping to have our long-distance gifts on their way by next week also.
Next weekend we're decorating and putting lights on the house... and the weekend after we'll go get our Christmas tree! (it seems like we're waiting a long time, but I guess that's because Thanksgiving was early this year... we decided we should wait on the tree since we have our New Year Dinner so we want our tree to last after Christmas) (anyone out here know of a good tree farm by the way?!) Then with all of our decorating done and our gifts on their way, we can get down to some real relaxing and enjoying the holiday stuff... baking and going to look at lights and getting together with friends. I love Christmas!!
I hate to say it, but I was glad Thanksgiving was early this year... more time to get ready for Christmas!!

So it appears I'm back to my regularly scheduled blog babbling. That wasn't so hard.