Brief Hello

I didn’t intend to be gone for so long, but I guess life happens. Tomorrow we fly to St. Louis for my grandmother’s memorial. What I really needed this week was rest at home, instead I’ll finally be working through my grief.

Only four weeks until the winter break, but who’s counting.

I wish I had more to say, but I don’t really. There is a lot going on right now and it’s hard to know where to begin, so it’s easier to say nothing.

I am so lucky that I usually don’t have to fly at this time of year to be with family. It’s stressful and expensive and exhausting. I wish I didn’t have to do it, but I must. I spent all weekend getting ready; writing sub plans for the Monday I’ll miss when we get back; doing copious amounts of laundry so we have what we need on our trip, AND when we get home; packing. I brought the tree in from the shed but it’s not going to be put up like I wanted. Maybe we can get it up when we get home. Thanksgiving is already so late, and we’re gone until the Monday after so we’ll barely have it up three weeks before Christmas. I guess this year, it’s as good as we’re going to get.

{On a related note, I am SOOOOO glad I bought a fake tree last year and I already have it and I know it fits and I don’t have to bother with any of the buying or transporting of a regular tree. So, so, sooooo glad. That fake Christmas tree was the best thing I ever bought for myself.}

One positive thing that has come from all of this: I was going through my Shutterfly albums looking for pictures of my grandmother and I ended up scrolling through hundreds of pictures of my kids over the years. It was so fun to remember how cute they were. At 6 and 9.5 I don’t take as many pictures of them these days; back then I took thousands! I very much appreciate that I could find everything so easily on Shutterfly – all the pictures of St. Louis are on there because I make the photo book every summer. If it weren’t for that site, I would have had to hook up my external hard drive and browse through literally thousands of photos. It was so much easier just going onto Shutterfly. I promise this isn’t some kind of paid advertisement, I was just pleasantly surprised by how easy that site made it for me to find pictures of my grandmother.

And I suppose that is everything for now. I need to do more packing, and picking up, before we go.

Happy Thanksgiving!