"Give Thanks to the Lord..."

This week has flown by!  Between the Thanksgiving celebrations and no sleep we've been running in circles all week long. Praise God for a very chill Monday!  So far Carly and I have slept in (I'll get to that), played, had a heaping bowl of oatmeal for breakfast, mailed our Christmas cards, went shopping and read books.  When she wakes up from her nap we will go for a run and play outside.  My kind of day!!

We have much to be thankful for this year.  I've actually been posting something to Facebook everyday.  Reminding myself of how much we've been given lifts my spirits when I'm down, and especially sleep deprived.  So it's been a good excersise.  But more on that later.

We celebrated Thanksgiving twice this past week.  First, we had a potluck with a group from church.  We had loads and loads of incredibly delicious foods all on the patio of one of our friend's clubhouse in their neighborhood.  It was a little chilly but not bad.  I did end up finding 17 misquito bites on my arms from my short sleeve t-shirt though!  Yikes!  I didn't take any pictures so I don't have any to share except for one that Karalea took.  Carly LOVED crawling around the table and as we all went around and shared what we were most thankful for, she would crawl to whomever was speaking.  Pretty sweet.

Thursday morning I went to work and gave everyone I saw a hug and thanked them for working!  A co-worker had made pancakes so we feasted on those and then DTD had a lovely Thanksgiving meal for everyone who was working, so I helped serve food as well.  Three Thanksgivings ago when I worked my first major holiday I was in tears, but this year I was in high spirits and full of hugs.  I think I'll be the same way when I get up at 5am to head to work Christmas morning. 

After work I met Brian and Carly at our "soon-to-be-hope-to-be" new house!  I actually haven't announced this on the blog yet, or told many friends for that matter, but it was part of the day so I'm including a photo.  I will explain why it's a "soon-to-be-hope-to-be" house another time. :)

After taking photos of the house, we had a lovely meal at Todd & Brenna's.  Our story with the Nelson's goes back to our first year at Iowa State when Brenna was a grad assistant in New Student Programs and then she performed in the Music Man with us.  She was the one who convinced us to move to Florida and her and Todd literally welcomed us with open arms and started us on the right foot.  Truth be told we would have never gotten into management so quickly without her networking advice.  I thank God for the Nelson's all the time!  They even let us move in with them for 2 weeks when we were homeless because we hadn't closed on our house yet.  So...this was our third annual Thanksgiving and we had a wonderful time catching up with them! 

Oh what a week it's been!  Carly has been waking up at all hours of the night all week long and we've tried everything to get her to go back to sleep but she just wants to be awake and playing!  It's funny, because here is one of the messages from Baby Center this week: "Don't be surprised if your sound sleeper suddenly becomes a night owl or has a hard time falling asleep at this age.  Why?  Sleep disturbances often go hand-in-hand with reaching major milestones in cognitive and motor development and with separation anxiety.  Because your baby is refining and expanding on these skills, your baby may wake up at night to practice or be too excited to fall asleep.  If you baby can't self soothe back to sleep, she will end up crying for you."  This is exactly what's happening with Carly.  So when she actually slept a normal night last night for the first time in a week, and slept until 8am instead of 6am without wanting to play in the night, her daddy and mommy woke up thankful!  :)  Baby Center also mentions separation anxiety and goes into detail about it and they hit that one on the nose, too.  I'll talk about that tomorrow, though.

Lastly, Brenna took some family photos of us on Thanksgiving and they turned out alright.  So I thought I'd share those, too.

Happy Thanksgiving (four days late) and I hope you are all in Christmas mode like the Weiss trio is!