Is it Thursday?? Holy crap, it's Thursday!!

This week has been a discombobulated mess of sorts. My last posting? Yeah, I started it on Monday and only just now posted it. Lame, I know. So here we are, just a few days from the big day. Today is Christmas Eve-Eve, the day that we here in the Brown Family kick off our holiday festivities. Every year, my mother-in-law (the sane one) hosts a huge crab feed at her home. Her brother brings fresh caught crab from up North and cooks it up for our indulgence on CEE. He barbecues bacon wrapped albacore as an appetizer and we gather together in close quarters, sipping on wine, laughing at the kids, munching on bread and salad, and cracking crab shells. Usually we wind up spraying our tablemates with crab juice or lemon. It's all good. Really, it's quite fantastic. We are kind of a loud bunch. We tease and laugh and make inappropriate jokes that the kids don't get. We play games and usually the kids can cajole someone into letting them open just ooooooone present. It's a blast and I look forward to it every year.

Tomorrow is cookie madness at our house. Tomorrow I will wake up early and absolutely destroy every square inch of my kitchen. See, I don't have any counter space, so I have to be extremely effective in flat space usage. I will bake approximately twenty dozen cookies by myself -well, in all honesty I will have two 'helpers' but that really winds up being more work. Then I will box said cookies into festive holiday boxes, shower, and leave for my mom's. She's approximately a 5k away (I'm actually thinking of maybe running to her house to get my training run in and showering once I get there, but we'll see) and we will do our Christmas dinner with her, my stepdad, and siblings.

THEN on Christmas morning I cook the traditional Christmas breakfast that the kids won't let me flake on. Eggs, bacon, pancakes, toast....I've scaled back. When people used to come over it included sausage and hash browns. I have to draw the line somewhere. This year our Christmas morning will just be the four of us Browns and my sister that lives with us. It will be the first year in five years that my brother-in-law hasn't stayed overnight and spent the morning with us. I'm kind of sad, but I know that he is starting his new life with his fiancee and I am reluctantly happy to share him with her and her family. I digress. Following our present bonanza, we stay in our pajamas and drive 45 minutes to my in-laws (again, the sane ones) house to open the most ridiculous amount of presents anyone has ever seen. Truly, there are a lot of people there, and they all LOOOOOOVE to give. I'll take a picture of the presents tonight because they will have already started before we get there on Christmas. There is usually a pile of gifts around the tree that is taller than my four-foot kid and extends about six feet into the living room. It takes HOURS. So many hours, they usually take a break. A present intermission, can you believe it? It's ridiculous. But my kids enjoy it a lot. They are the only two in their generation, so they get spoiled to the extreme. Lots of clothes, books, toys, toys, toys, toys. We have to take the SUV out there. We made the mistake one year of bringing the car and not everything fit. And this was back when we had only one kid....

So you probably won't hear from me until next week. Hopefully I will have put a few more miles under my belt (and ZERO pounds!!!!). I'll be sure to share pictures of the festivities.

I hope everyone has a truly blessed and joyous holiday surrounded with loved ones. You all deserve the best. <3