'Tis the season

This weekend was EXHAUSTING.

Saturday morning, we had a clean-up day at work to spruce up our office for some bigwigs coming into town on Wednesday. Saturday afternoon, I went to Jessica's Christmas party where we almost burned down her apartment with an exploding candle and ate a lot of cookies. Sunday afternoon Todd and I hosted our own Christmas party (complete with two 4-year-olds, one 8-year-old, one 15-month-old, one 9-month-old, one 6-month old, and a partridge in a pear tree) and therefore spent most of the morning prepping and the rest of the evening in recovery. Take all that and add in one feral, vicious toddler who refused to nap the entire weekend and HOO BOY, I'm glad it's Monday.

Not so long ago I mentioned that our house was officially on the market. After only 19 days, we got an offer. A really GOOD offer. Now our house is under contract, with closing scheduled for *deep breath* December 30th. It goes without saying that we'd expected it to take months to sell our house, not weeks.

We made a deal to rent the house back from the new owner until January 11th, partly to give us the holidays, and partly to give us time to find somewhere to live for the next four to six months while our new house is being built. Do you have any idea how hard it is to find a rental house with a fence that allows pets and doesn't require a minimum 12-month lease? Right now, we have a deal to rent a house in the neighborhood we're building in, and since it's owned by the developer, we don't have to worry about breaking a lease to move when the new one is completed. The only downside is, he won't spring to finish the fence, so we can't keep Niki with us. The current plan is for her to stay with friends at night, and come to work with me during the day.

In the meantime, we're going to enjoy our last few weeks in the house. Last year we kind of missed Christmas, so this year we're making an effort to celebrate. We actually had friends over for the first time in a couple years, and we'll be hosting Christmas dinner at our house with my sister's family and my parents in attendance. I'm hoping to finish my Christmas shopping BEFORE Christmas Eve. I'm also still planning on mailing out Christmas cards, once the pictures come in later this week. I should have done photocards, but I figured why not make it harder?

On top of all that, I'm putting together my application to (finally) take the PE exam in April. Once that's submitted in January, it's time to start studying. I haven't used most of my general engineering knowledge in over six years, so I've got my work cut out for me.

But I'll just go ahead and say now that no matter what else piles on, I have three days at the end of December when our office is closed but the daycare is open, and I intend to spend at least one of those days doing absolutely NOTHING. And it will be awesome.