1100 miles/19 hours

Tomorrow was supposed to be the day when my cousins from Chicago were going to drive from Illinois to Texas. That was before both my husband and my cousin's husband looked at MapQuest and said "Are you girls out of your minds?"

It seems that from there to here would take 19 hours of driving, for over 1,100 miles. My cousin R thought they could leave early tomorrow morning and be here before dinner-time. When she told me that on the phone a couple of weeks ago, it seemed like a good plan to me and I said Sure! Come on down!

Being that they had just a long weekend for this trip, R's husband thought it was too much driving (especially with their two young children in the car) and my husband said they should just wait till they could stay more than just a weekend here, if they were going to spend that much time driving from there to here.

Oh well. I'm sure her kids were disappointed. So were we all. The kids have been on the phone with me, telling me they were going to come and see us, and they were all excited. And so was I-- their Christmas gifts are already wrapped up for them...... I thought we could all have an early Christmas together before they set out for home. It would have been nice to see the expressions on the kids' faces when they opened up their gifts.

Again-- oh well. The gifts are wrapped and ready. I will just put them into a packing box after Thanksgiving and ship them up to Chicago. I'm sure the kids will call me after they open everything up, as they did for their birthdays.

So now we have just two weekends with friends coming this month...... our friends who moved to upstate NY, along with K and B so we can all have Thanksgiving together like we used to..... and then Mr. & Mrs. H, stopping here after their Thanksgiving in Dallas, en route to their home in Pennsylvania.

After Thanksgiving, we'll be getting the big tree for the living room..... and out will come all the blown-glass ornaments. We'll have to be extra careful with those..... if they drop on the wood floors, they'll smash into bits. I certainly don't miss that wall-to-wall carpeting that we had in the other house. Not because the carpeting wasn't nice, but just because it was a pain to keep clean with a dog and three cats. (Not to mention 35 friends at the Charades parties and 50 friends and neighbors at the Christmas party.) But that carpeting was an ornament-saver, if nothing else.

Christmas party....... I suggested to my husband that we (translation: I) plan a Christmas party this year. It won't be as large as the parties in the other house, but it will at least be a party. We truly missed not hosting a Halloween party this year... so I don't want us to have that same regret when Christmas comes and goes.

"When Christmas comes and goes....." -- It's not even Thanksgiving yet. Slow down.