catching up

Hi! I hope you all had a blessed Thanksgiving! We traveled over to Snohomish on Wed. morning to spend Thanksgiving with my family at my parents house. It was a very long drive and I was quite ready to get out of the car after 6 hours on the road. I had finished my last physical therapy session for now that morning and he worked my leg hard and I was in pain and aggrivated. Of course I took it out on Kenny. ;)
As soon as we got to my parents house, my mom snagged my up and we went to Lasting Memories, which is a scrapbooking store in the Alderwood area. It was wonderful to get to go to a scrappy store that actually carries a lot of new stuff! I even got to see the Creative Cafe display that I have heard everyone raving about. I was oohing and ahhing over everything. My mom treated me to a few small items which was very kind of her. I picked up some foofala buttons, some pp and a handful of the felt flowers from Creative Cafe. I only wish we had a store this cool around me, at least close by. There's a store in Cd'A that I like, but I just don't get out that way too often.
After the visit to the scrappy store, my parents took us out to a nice dinner at the Spaghetti Factory. Fun times and good food! I think they were trying to prep us for Thanksgiving dinner. lol
Thanksgiving was awesome! My brother Travis and his family had shown up late Wed. night while we were sleeping. Him, my dad and I made a Starbucks run and then went back home to veg. We scoured the papers and Travis helped Kara with her Pre-Calculus homework, which took several hours. While scouring the papers I ran across a cute little Pinkish special edition Nintendog DS and knew that Ashlyn would adore this! I joked with my mom that she should take me out shopping Friday morning not thinking too much about it and she asked me if I was serious and I told her no way! Ha! Boy was I wrong.
In the early afternoon my other two brothers showed up as well as the neighbors who are like family to us. It got real loud, real quick. My brothers and I started drinking wine and my brother Travis got quite intoxicated which is not his style. He and I were cracking up and having a great time! We usually drink, but not this much and even I felt it more than normal. This is when I decided that I was for sure going to go shopping and that Toys R Us was the place we were going to go. And since the store opened at 5AM we needed to be there by at least 4, so if we left by 3:40 we'd be there. My mom told me that if I was serious in the morning then we'd go.
I was. And crazily enough we left at 3:30 Friday morning and headed out. It was insane! Me, on crutches with a cast. Me, who loathes crowds and avoids them as much as possible. Me, who doesn't care for shopping unless I have a purpose, went out on Black Friday to do the very thing I never imagined I would do again. And I had an awesome time! My mom asked me why I wanted to do this and my reply was "Beacause I can.". I didn't think for a minute that I was going to get that DS since quantites are usually low on electronic items, but I thought what the heck, I have nothing to lose but spending a few crazy hours with my mom. It was insane and there were at least 200 people in front of when we slid into line at 4, and I really lost all hope of getting anything. Guess what? I got the DS and even a Sony digi camera for Meghan which was $50 off! Awesome! We were out of the store by 5:30. Only one person was rude to me and she actually rammed her cart into me and told me to "move it!". I restrained myself from beating her with a crutch. Some people are rude and this is just life. She's got to live with herself, not me. My mom took me to Starbucks after that which just happened to be in the Target parking lot. After we sat down and drank our drinks, we decided to go to Target since they were going to open at 6 and it was too early to go back home. Now that place had a line! We didn't walk to the back of the line since it was super long, but we did wait up front for the end of the line to come and it took over 10 minutes. People were just piling in like crazy! Surprisingly it didn't seem packed and Target was very organized. We spent an hour and half walking around and I ended up getting a portable DVD player for Skye with a 10" screen and some other little things for the girls.
All in all it was a successful venture. I didn't expect anything, yet accomplished to get everything I wanted. Not too bad! And I enjoyed the one on one with my mom that we never get. Not like this. I would do it again. :)
Once we got back we loaded up the car and headed down South to Tacoma to spend the rest of Friday with Kenny's parents and two of his brothers. Another wonderful time! We got to see Emily and Mike and his new wife and her daughter. Mom and Dad looked great and it was nice to kick back and just talk like we used to when we lived over there. We sure miss everyone, but we love it over here!
We left for home late Friday night, about 7PM and made excellent time. We here home by midnight. The animals were happy to see us and it was so great to lay in our own bed. There's no place like home, that's for sure!
I have just been trying to play catch up the past few days. I have also come down with a cold in stages which has been dragging me down, but at least I wasn't slammed full force.

I have some scrappy stuff to share. The two cards are using the awesome Pink.Sugar.Pop. stamps, some stacked boxes I made using Cosmo Cricket which is the November sponsor over at CMK, some layouts, as well as 2 altered items for a CT call I submitted for over at Heart In Hand Scraps. Tammy owns this site and it would be an honor to be on the CT! The project designers are super talented and creative and this team would be such a fun opportunity. Wish me luck!

We got about 3" of snow last night. Yay! It did stink being confined to the house all day, but at least it's beautiful outside. More is on the way tomorrow, we're expected to get snow for about 24 hours and we may end up with 5"+ by the time the storm has blown over Thursday night. That's what I call snow! It's early for us to get this much, but I'll take it.

Take care!
Rae