Weekend Update

As usual, it was a long weekend.

Saturday there was yet another snow storm. The Mr. and I seem to live under a rock. We watched the weather on Friday night and went to bed. They said snow was coming, but only an inch or two, stopping in the afternoon. After breakfast we ran around town doing our errands, all the while laughing with each other that it seemed like a pretty hefty two inches. Much later in the afternoon, while we're driving to the evening church service, we turn the radio on. The weather guy comes on and says it's going to keep on snowing well past midnight and add up to about 6 inches!!

Then we really started laughing. It never even occurred to either one of us at any point during the day to turn on a radio or TV to see if the forecast had changed. We just kept expecting it to stop.

Sunday was another long day, but one that I'm feeling great about. You see, I had just that one day to do all the holiday gift shopping. We only do gifts for kids in all our extended families, but that still leaves me with 12 kids to shop for, 4 of which have now firmly settled in the teen category. Off I went, early in the day, telling the family, hang in there, I'm not coming back until I'm done.

I got it done, was home by 5:30 and was under budget. It only took 3 stores, 1 mall, 1 jumbo slice of pizza with the works and 1 Twix bar. I did have to park about 9 miles away from every store I went to, and the parking lots were not plowed. That meant people made up their own parking rules. It's amazing to me how many different ways a person will park when there are no little lines on the ground. There were also plenty of snow banks taller than my car. I also had to spend about 15 minutes outside in the freezing cold rearranging the packages to fit into the car.

Right now, I'm just enjoying the feeling of being done with the store part. I may even get the wrapping done before Christmas Eve, although it is tradition to stay up way to late wrapping.

For school, we're happily on break until after the 1st. Woo Hoo! Today, I'm simply wishing my boys came with a volume control. It's just plain too cold to be playing outside and all indoor boy activity seems to happen at a deafening volume.

One last note, for those of you following, or at least those who remember me mentioning it, I'm almost done with my reading goal. This was my year to read the Bible cover to cover. I started in January and I'm happy to say that if I stay focused here in the next week or two, I should be right on track to be finished by the end of the year. It's been a goal of mine for a long time to read it through, and now being close to the end, I can say the second time will be a lot easier.

I don't know why we make it out to be such a difficult thing or such a big deal. I know that it was to me. I've read bigger books and even some that were perhaps "harder," but I was just never able to get through it. This year I decided that I just had to do it, knowing that once I'd read the Bible through the big deal of it all would be gone. I know that each of the next times, I'll just be growing and enjoying.