Sweet Caroline

Life has been crazy busy lately- but in a good way! My new job is going awesome and I’m loving it, but with a new area of the law- I’m doing some shadowing / training right now and it’s been B-U-S-Y!  We’ve had a wonderful January and although it’s been long it’s been fun.  My bestie from Ohio came in town for a weekend and we had the best time together- lifetime friends are just so special 💜 It’s been pretty chilly here - obvi nothing like the polar vortex that’s invading the north right now but it’s def been a cold January for us in S.C.-  but we’ve still managed to play outside when the sun is shining.  We finally made it to a basketball game - chaos and cocky! Dance friends - love how much my girl is loving dance.  More outside play :-) Celebrating a fun 40th bday for a friend! Sometimes- they are still sweet to each other ;-) Like I said- it’s been cold!! Looking forward to a laid back weekend- we are out of town a lot in March so I’m going to soak up the down time till then!

In an effort to make memories and not add to our collection of plastic crap- we took the kids to Disney as part of their Christmas present. We literally went for ONE day of magic kingdom fun- and it was perfect. Some people thought we were crazy, but the driving doesn’t bother us that much. We left on a Saturday morning - went and explored Disney Springs Saturday night and spend from sun up till way past sun down in magic kingdom! We had just gone a year ago, so we didn’t need a big trip- but the boys literally talked about going back NON stop. We were able to stay at a non property hotel that still let you book fast passes 60 days out so that was a major plus. We went non stop and the kids had a blast. I bought the pirate/mermaid experience for the kids, but Thomas decided against it- you never know what a kid is going to do! But, he was the only one who rode splash mountain, so he had zero clue that the pirate thing cost extra- so that was his “special treat”. G and C LOVED the pira

Mikey took a lot of time off over Christmas, so coupled with me being in between jobs- it turned out we had quite a bit of family time together. We spent a lot of time at home playing and relaxing, but we also got in some fun activities as well! My boys had been begging to go back to Chuck E Cheese- but I feel like it’s too crowded there on weekend nights, so we finally went one morning over break. That place gets a bad rap! It was clean, bright and airy, and cheap!! All three had a ball.  We walked around the mall after returning a shirt- rose the carousel and went to belk to ride the elevator and escalator- who knew such things could be so exciting!? I took Collins and a friend roller skating one day - the boys enjoyed some time at Weezies - my girl got skates from Santa and wanted to put them to use! We also all enjoyed a family night out seeing Ralph breaks the internet- it was SO good and very clever. I never watched the first one, but this one was so cute.  And here we are almost

From Christmas Eve service at church to our tradition of steaks and potatoes for Christmas Eve dinner - I always love Christmas Eve- such a fun night of anticipation.  We are with my mom’s side of the family for Christmas Eve and then we celebrate on Christmas Day (afternoon/ evening) with Mikey’s family. It’s a busy but wonderful two days. And of course, it always feels like it’s over in 4.5 hrs. I can’t believe it’s already almost two weeks post Christmas - it sure was a special one for our family. 

Only a couple more days now until I rejoin the working world; I’m so thankful to have these memories and pictures to look back on of my time off. All the kiddos had Christmas performances, the boys got to go eat lunch with Collins for the first time, we went to our favorite holiday lights on the river- and maybe one of the best things we did was when Collins and I went with her dance studio and passed our Christmas cards at the hospital- pure joy in my heart watching that. We enjoyed our fourth annual “Santa party” with friends; went swimming with my side of the family during our Christmas celebration, and went caroling with friends for the first time- so fun! We also managed to watch about 7/8 kids Christmas movies on the couch :-) Truly the best season!