Merry Christmas!

My son Kimball introduced me to the comic strip "The Argyle Sweater" It reminds me of another old favorite comic strip - "The Far Side". The Argyle Sweater isn't in my local paper, so I have to look it up online.

We are mostly ready to Christmas at this house. Well... not Terrell. He never does any Christmas shopping until the 24th, so we know what he will be doing today. Christmas is pretty easy for me, I don't do anything that causes any stress to my life. So that means I don't do holiday cooking & I send out Christmas cards if I have time. This year we sent out a photo Christmas card, I didn't even type up a family letter to go with it this year. Sometime I want to send out a family letter like this one:


We did do a fun Christmas picture for our card this year:


It's been rather quiet around my house for the past few months. I decided last January, that 2009 would be my last year doing daycare. (Did I mention I've been doing daycare for 18 years?) Over the past few months, the number of children that I watch has slowly decreased. By the beginning of December, I was only watching 4 children, and only one of those was full time (well, he wasn't even full time because he only came Mon-Thurs). Last Tuesday was my last day.

Remember this picture from a post several weeks ago?


Yesterday I spent a chunk of time cleaning, throwing out old toys, and putting things away. Here's what my house looks like now - I'm ready for it to be a kid-free zone.

family room


All the play pens are put away. I'll probably get rid of all of them except one.


One of the "toy buckets". This was before I went thru it and threw a bunch of toys away


I bought this last fall at Ikea. I have kept it at the top of the stairs in the hall, so I could watch kids playing with it - to make sure they didn't beat the heck out of it. I moved it downstairs yesterday so it is with the other "play house" things. I will probably get out some of the play food and stock it up, for the grandkids to play with.

Here are my cute grandkids. From now on, they will be the only kids I tend:

Cailyn - sporting a new nail job - each finger nail has a rhinestone stuck on it.


Gavin - this was on Thanksgiving, after he had played in the water fountain at the church where we held our "Ashcraft Family Thanksgiving" dinner.