Happy New Year!

Well, we've officially survived another holiday season. The house looks bare without its holiday finery, but much more spacious. No resolutions here, but it's always good to evaluate and adjust as necessary. You'll be hearing more on that in the days ahead.

So what else have we been up to? A couple days after Christmas, a friend called to tell me about an awesome trash-picking opportunity. We cruised on over and I happily rifled through trash bags while my hubby ducked down in the car (he was apparently rather embarassed by my zeal). It was kinda cold, so we ended up tossing two entire bags in the back of the car and hauling them home. Our son ended up with a bunch of cars and motorcyles, a very cool Matchbox playset (complete with crane!), skates that slip on over his shoes, part of a drum set (although he hasn't been allowed to play with it yet), a castle building set (lego-sized megablocks - the bags had never even been opened!), alphabet magnet set (in a storage case), and some miscellaneous transformer-like figures. I still can't believe the stuff that people throw away. Anyway, the deal was that NONE of it was allowed in the house until we sorted everything we already had. We did a very thorough purge of the kids toys - dumped every single drawer and bin and went crazy sorting it all out. Pitched everything that was broken or missing pieces, and set aside several bags to pass along to other families. It felt so good to get it all straightened out! The kids are also old enough that they're able to put their things away properly (i.e. in the box within the drawer, rather than just tossing everything into the drawer). Now I think we're ready for our daughter's birthday next Friday :)

Other funny story about the trash picking - my friend called me while we were at the drive-through ATM. Well, I got so excited that I grabbed the cash and receipt, then drove off without my ATM card. First time I've ever done something like that. Thankfully I realized what I'd done that evening, so was able to go to the bank the next day and get my card back. A bit embarassing, but thankfully it wasn't a big hassle.

So what else has been going on? I renewed my driver's license (yes, I do live a very exciting life!), continued the potty training journey with our little girl (she's now wearing underwear, but still having occasional accidents), visited the thrift store, and just generally enjoyed down time at home. We did go out on New Year's Eve - hung out with some friends. Ate, chatted, and played "Apples to Apples." (very fun game, by the way! Will definitely be adding it to our stash when I find it on sale :) We did a sort of sleepover with the kiddos, which just means that we were hoping they'd all fall asleep so that we grown-ups could play our game uninterrupted. It sort of worked, and our kids were quite disappointed to wake up in their own room on Jan 1.

Well, I think you're all now caught up on happenings at the D House. I have some deeper stuff rolling around in my brain, but I need to think on it a bit more before putting it into words. But all in all, I must say that so far it has been a good year ;)