Busy Days

The last couple of days have been pretty busy.  I am still decorating, little by little.   Yesterday mom came over and we wrapped presents for Mark.  In fact I still have a couple yet to wrap.  I'm planning on making some treats to send to him as well, maybe some Puppy Chow.   Not really puppy chow, of course, but a snack made with Chex cereal, chocolate and peanut butter - very yummy!  He has lots of presents coming - 12 in fact. The plan is that he will open one gift each day for 12 days before Christmas.  He promises that he won't open them all at once - but Greg did when I sent the 12 Days of Christmas to him.  I'll write a little verse to go with each day, such as . . . . . 

Today's gift, if you really do care

Is something special you'll need for your hair.

We know for this mission you've truly been called ~  

But your greatest fear before returning,

is that you'll start to go bald!

Can't reveal what it is though - not yet, anyway, just in case he has the opportunity to glance at my blog!  Well that verse only took a few minutes; so maybe after an hour I'll be done!  Hmmmm. . . 

And today, Mom came again.  If it weren't for her, the other Christmas tree would likely not be up.  But she came and encouraged me to lets get going with the other tree and so we did and here it stands.  I was then motivated to venture into my storage room to find the ornaments.  These are actually my favorite ones, because they're all the special ones the kids have created over the years, plus other memorable ones.  Okay, so it took literally half the day to get this little tree up!  I'm not even kidding.  After my joy in only 15 minutes  spent getting the pre-lit 9 footer up; this one was a major pain in the you know what.  First the branches were not all in the box, so that required me to go back to the storage area to find the missing ones.  If you'd ever seen this storage area, you would understand my frustration.   But I found them - Problem solved, right?  WRONG!!!  Parts of the stand were also missing; which I already knew, but I knew how to improvise!  WRONG again!  My plan was to put the tree in a tree stand that we had for real Christmas trees.  It had worked fine in the past, but this year, not so much.  We got it standing, lights strung - and then it started leaning.  Eventually it was no longer leaning, but closer to lying!  But after much rigging and muttering and threatened crying, we finally got it up.  And it's in the corner, where it belongs for causing so much commotion!  But it's pretty and so far behaving itself nicely.  As I have been writing, Angel, our Cocker Spaniel was attempting to lay down under it; that's one of her favorite corners.  "Don't you dare", I scolded.  She retreated, head hanging.  I don't understand what it is about the whole tree putting up thing that makes me feel so unChristmaslike; that is if it takes longer than 15 minutes!