We have had a busy, busy couple of months. I knew the months around the holidays would fly, and they did! We stayed here the weekend of Christmas and enjoyed some quiet time as a family. My sister and her husband were here for a few hours on Christmas day and we all went to brunch at the Ritz Carlton Downtown Atlanta. Oh. My. Gosh. Recommend. I am usually a fan of "traditional" Christmas dinner (i.e. turkey/ham/all the trimmings, cooked at home!) but being about eight months pregnant was an excellent excuse for breaking tradition. (I also just wasn't in the mood to cook.)

Here's Nora in her Christmas dress before church on Christmas Eve.



Me.



Jason with the longest hair he's ever had (he's had it cut since then):



Here's a blurry pic of our tree.



A couple of things about the tree--every year I laugh at how pathetically skinny and unrealistic-looking it is. But I kind of love it for being that way. You can't tell this from the picture, but about 50% of the ornaments are concentrated in the bottom 1-2 feet of the tree (Nora hung them). I think it's silly-looking, but perfect at the same time.

Jason had to work the week after Christmas, but we did make it to Pensacola for about two days around New Year's. There, we opened many more presents and we got to visit with a lot of people, though not everyone we would like to see. We did see six different groups of people, though, and opened presents with all of them! Whew.

We've been doing a lot of stuff around the house. We got new furniture for the living room and slowly that room is finally coming together--for the first time, really, since what we had before was a mishmash and we were never really happy with it. We still need to hang pictures and do a few other things in there, but I am really liking it these days. Our new couches are so comfortable! (Ask Jason--he keeps falling asleep on them!) we moved out old, ugly computer desk in there and it doesn't really match anything else, plus it's not meeting our storage needs. There's a secretary desk I've been eying on Overstock.com, but we don't have the money right now. It sold out a couple of days ago, but I'm going to cross my fingers that it comes back in stock in a few months when we expect to have a little more cashflow.

See? Pretty.















Jason's in the process of painting Nora's new room. We hope she'll be moved in sometime this week. I know "they" say that you should have this taken care of a few months before the new baby comes (we're looking at ~6 weeks) but, well, obviously that didn't happen. I need to do a major toy and clothes purge. Most of what we've been working on lately is going through all of our things and trying to get rid of things we don't use anymore. Living in a small space is challenging! I'm probably the least likely candidate for making the most out of the least amount of space, but I'm trying. As I type this I'm going through all of our old CDs and making sure we have them on ITunes so I can give away the physical CDs. We just don't have room for them anymore! There are some boxes/crates/closets that haven't been completely cleaned out since we moved in almost five years ago, so I guess it was time, anyway.

I realize this is pretty much the most boring blog in existence, but there you have it.