Busy, Busy, Busy!

The title quote today is actually from the old Frosty the Snowman cartoon, which we watched this weekend while decorating the tree. It's also a line we use quite often around here, and rarely moreso than the last few days. We were incredibly busy over the long weekend.

It all began with Thanksgiving, of course, which was a very intensive afternoon of furiously preparing a wide array of side dishes to go with the turkey entree. It was a magnificent dinner, however, and more than worth all the cooking and cleaning that went into it. My wife topped it all off with these little ramekins of chocolate souffle-cake that were absolutely delicious.

Friday involved further cleaning the house and then watching my wife and kids set up various Christmas decorations. We watched Frosty the Snowman, Frosty Returns, and Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer.

But Saturday was THE day. The day started off marvelously when the older kids MADE BREAKFAST! This is unprecedented in our household and pretty darn cool. They managed to make pancakes that were almost as good as my wife's (same recipe) and as far as I could see they did not make a huge mess doing it. Way to go kids!! Then, not only was there a flurry of cleaning (the kids have to do their chores on Saturday, plus my wife was in an absolute frenzy), but in the middle of the day my kids cashed in on the promise that since my allergy shots were fairly far along, we could at last get a cat. Here she is:

That's Dutchess, a domestic long-haired cat, and the newest member of our family. We made a trip over to the ASPCA and within about ten minutes I was holding Dutchess in my arms. We'd already looked at a dozen cats or more and looked at a few more after, but everybody agreed that she was a keeper. She's soft, sweet, and friendly. Unlike our experience at PetSmart, where they took our info without telling us that the cat we wanted had already been requested by six other people, we were able to walk out of the ASPCA within minutes with our box 'o cat under my arm. The kids spent the rest of the afternoon "tailing" her around the house as she investigated her new home. Hopefully she won't expect the place to always bee this clean.

The upcoming week holds great promise, too. The kids are in school all five days for a change, and I have nothing fancy scheduled on the calendar, so I'm hoping to really burn through chapter edits on my novel and try to get caught up to where I'd wanted to be - ready to plow into new chapters by December. I'm behind schedule, but I'd like to hope I won't end up losing the entire month of December (which is already around ten days short thanks to Christmas break) before I get back on track.

Best of all, though, is that on Thursday we get to graduate to our purple belts in karate! Woo! We all continue to make steady progress and I can see the improvement in everyone (well, except my wife, I suppose. She's been down this road before). That's the important thing, of course - that we're making steady growth and improvement in our skills, knowledge, technique and physical fitness, but it's nice to celebrate the milestones. And so, as always, we continue to be Busy, Busy, Busy!