Charlie came today! Charlie is going to report to Santa how I have been. And we put up put up our Christmas decorations and that was fun! I had a pyjama party at school on Friday.

He said

After a lot of looking around, we managed this week to finally find a place for Wolfie to hibernate for the winter. Thanks to Kijiji and a man with a shed on his farm property south of London, we found a very reasonable winter bed for Wolfie to hunker down in. Ideally, we would have gotten all over this before the first of the snow, but my trip to California for three weeks, put a wrench in those plans. Regardless the driveway said goodbye to Wolfie this morning, and we’ll be happy to see her back here in the spring!

Today being December 1st, we took care of another big thing on our winter agenda – we got the house dressed up for Christmas! After we got the trailer stowed away, we headed straight over to Mom & Dad’s to pick up our Christmas decorations for the house that we store in their basement. After getting the lights up a few weeks ago, Emelia has been chomping at the bit to get the rest of the decorations up at our house. She was so impatient when we were over at Mom & Dad’s visiting that she coerced Dad into getting their new Christmas tree up.

Earlier this week, we all got out to see our friend Grant Lawrence launch his latest book here in London at Landon Library in our old stomping grounds of Old South. The book is called “The Lonely End of the Rink” and is about his tumultuous love affair with the game of hockey that started with hating the game as a kid because of bullies, but falling headlong for it as an adult thanks to friends he made during his life as a musician and broadcaster for the CBC.

I had already got my copy and read it while on the plane to and from California and just thoroughly loved it. It has the right mix of hockey, music & Canadiana for me and I love the voice Grant has a writer. I whipped through the book and was very excited to see him and tell him how much I enjoyed it. We had dinner together, along with our friends Allyson, Marty Kolls – the musician that Grant had playing a few songs in the reading – as well as Grant.

Even though we had a typical light London crowd because of the blast of snow we had gotten the day prior, it was still a great event and a perfect midweek night out. Even Emelia usually quite shy was happy to sit through and listen to Grant read selections from the book. Though truthfully I think she was most smitten with Marty playing songs in between. But the funny part was at the end of the night she was quite upset that she didn’t get her own signed copies of Grant’s books. Apparently Daddy’s copies weren’t enough!

Danielle and I have decided that in stead of big gifts for each other for Christmas this year, we’re going to join our gift forces and use them to finish off our bedroom for once and for all! Ever since we went back to a queen sized bed and the old-looking antique style bed frame, we’ve been wanting to redo our room right down to the paint colour. As much as we loved that pumpkin colour we had, especially at this time of year, we’d like the room much lighter. So with that as our combined present to each other, we’ve started planning and mapping out the new look. We’ll post before and after pics in the coming weeks.

With the house really starting to look and feel like Christmas, it’s really putting me into the festive spirit. We have a lot going on this year at Christmas and I am really looking forward to it. We have the Stuart McLean Vinyl Cafe Christmas Show, as well as the Teeter family gathering and the Japp’s coming here too! But one thing I am super excited about is on December 10th we have Jenn Grant playing a concert in our house! So, there is absolutely a ton to get excited about!

And on that note, I am going to pass the keyboard to Danielle so she can do her thing!

She said

It’s certainly looking a lot like Christmas. Between the snow on the ground outside, the malls bustling with activity and Christmas music and Santa at the mall it is certainly feeling quite festive.

As Emelia gets older my love for the holidays slowly returns. I have not been a real Christmas person since my mom passed away almost 20 years ago but Emelia’s excitement is so infectious. She is a typical almost 7 year old, she is beyond excited, believing in every aspect of the magic of the holidays and we couldn’t be happier.

This week we crossed off some big Christmas milestones, first was the shaving of John’s Movember moustache (YEAH!), second was the annual trip to see Santa in the mall, third was transforming the house into a Christmas wonderland.

The weekend was busy with activity, John had to work yesterday and with the crappy weather this week I desperately needed to get a ton of errands done. The roads are getting busier and busier as we get closer to the big day so things like Costco, grocery shopping, Walmart shopping, Christmas shopping in general takes more time. But I did get a ton done, so all the groceries were done, got my hair cut, got some more Christmas shopping done and we even managed to get our annual Christmas card started. So we are in pretty fantastic shape.

As John said already John and I have decided that this year we will just do some smaller presents to open Christmas morning and finally get our bedroom redone. It has been almost 10 years since we painted it, our bedroom furniture doesn’t match, it is dark and we need a huge change. So last night once Emelia was asleep we spent a fair bit of time looking for more concrete ideas for the design we want.

We have a shopping list set from Ikea and it is just a matter of John having some time off so we can get down to do some shopping. With his very busy schedule I have a feeling this is going to take forever to get done but we at least know what we want to do, now it is a matter of getting the time to get things done.

Well Miss E is just finishing her bath and I have to get her to bed so I am going to keep my part short for this week, good-night until next Sunday.