It's December already!

 I have been shopping online for Christmas gifts for the last few weeks.    I am getting excited about having all of the kids here!  

Courtney and Zach are flying in- on the "red eye" arriving at around 6:30 am.     Morgan and Kim are taking the train- arriving in the middle of the day- a day or two before C&Z.  Darcy and Jody are (I assume) driving up with two of her kids.   Austin will be driving down from Maine with his cat and Chance will be driving up from Richmond.  Also with a cat.

So we will have 10 more people in the house than we usually have.  Good thing we have such a big house!

Nick and I consider the master bedroom upstairs to be our bedroom.  There is a smaller master bedroom on the main floor that we think of as the guest room.  But, since Buddy has been hurt and unable to climb stairs, we have moved into the main floor bedroom.   I really miss our bedroom, but it's okay.  Buddy is more important.

We have a whole system.  Buddy steps onto a blanket and then we gently lift him into the laundry basket.  That goes onto the "trolley", which has wheels on it and we wheel Buddy to a grassy place to go to the bathroom.  The system works well, but Nick and I are getting more exercise than we can handle almost.

this is Buddy's makeshift stroller.

I ordered calendars, as I do every year and have done for longer than I can remember.  The photos on the calendar are all pictures that I have taken.  Somehow either the calendar makers or  myself got something mixed up.  The first page of the calendar is April.   From there, all of the months are in the correct sequence,  but January, the supposed first month, is somewhere in the back pages of the calendar.   I am sure it will be okay.  Just puzzling a bit.

Yesterday I wrote the annual letter that I send out with our Christmas cards.  I have been mentally composing the letter for a while now (I do that every year).   I was going to say how hard this year has been with the loss of friends due to Covid, cancer and accidents.   I was going to go on about how it's been a hard year for everyone.  But when I sat down to write, none of the gloom and doom came out at all.  I wrote a pleasant, chatty letter.   That's better than the gloomy one I had planned.