Our Weekend - The One with a Day Date & Christmas Lights Looking

B took Friday off so we could finish up our Christmas shopping and have one more last little bit of time alone together since the kids will be with us 24/7 starting this Friday at noon.

We kicked off our day date with breakfast at Panera (and coffee from Starbucks) and once we had our morning fuel, we hit the stores – Target, Michaels, Hibbett Sports, the UPS Store, TJ Maxx, and Marshall’s.  I found yet another load of Rae Dunn stuff at TJM including a Christmas water bottle.  It is so cute!!  Then we headed to the mall for more shopping – At Home, Victoria’s Secret (I never let those free panty coupons go to waste!), H&M (where B found his very favorite Christmas song ever on a t-shirt – LOL), and the second Hibbett Sports location in town.  On the way out of the mall we swung by The Classic Cookie Company and grabbed some frosting cookies for dessert later and then we swung by At Home one last time to make some purchases. 

The kids have been begging me to decorate the house “spooky” for Halloween for the last couple of years but I’m usually all about the “fall” décor so I haven’t done it yet.  I am planning on doing it next year to surprise them, and I lucked out because At Home had all of their Halloween stuff 75% off!  I ended up getting everything I need to redecorate the entire mantle + two packs of spooky cocktail napkins for the bar cart all for less than $9!!!!  TOTAL, Y’ALL!!!!  Now I’m counting down the days until Halloween season next year so I can decorate.  Lol.

B and I were both over shopping by then so we headed to that new pizza restaurant in town for an early lunch and some day drinking… the actual “date” portion of our day date.  Haha.  When we do these day dates during the Christmas season we always end up shopping instead of actually doing anything date-ish.  We had actually planned to go to a movie this time, but there were none that ended early enough to make it to the car line in time.  Such a bummer.  Pizza and craft beers were great, too, though!

After lunch, we went back home to go lay out all of the Christmas gifts that we have for the kids.  We do this every year and it makes Christmas Eve a complete breeze!  This is what we do… once all of the gifts are laying out, we then decide which ones are going to be from us and which ones are going to be from Santa.  You may remember that I keep a list of everything that we purchase for everyone, so we also use this time to make sure that everything on my list is accounted for in the pile, and then we group items from us together, items from Santa together, and stocking items together and take pictures of each group one by one.  This week I’ll wrap the gifts that will be from us and then on Christmas Eve all I have to do is look at my pictures on my phone to make sure that we have everything when we’re laying it out.  Easy peasy.  This also helps to make sure that the gifts for each of the kids look “even,” you know, to make sure it doesn’t look like one kid has way more stuff than the other.  I’m telling you, this makes Christmas so much less stressful!

After all of the gift organizing we had a good hour of downtime AKA relaxing before getting back out in the yucky, rainy, cold to pick up the kids.  Since the weather was so bad we decided to stay at home Friday evening.  We just made sandwiches for dinner and then settled in for our annual viewing of Elf, complete with Christmas PJs, a fire in the fire place, and popcorn.  Perfect and cozy for a December evening.

Once B and I put the kids to bed we had our annual viewing of Love Actually and we ate our frosting cookies that we had picked up at Classic Cookie Company earlier in the day.  As always, the movie made me feel all warm and fuzzy.  It’s my favorite movie of all time and I cherish our annual viewings so much.

Saturday we stayed home all day.  I had intended to get a lot of stuff done around the house and finish wrapping Christmas presents, but for some reason I felt really under the weather.  I kept having some weird pain in my right side and it made me feel really nauseated for most of the day.  At first I was worried that it might be my appendix, but the pain was a bit too high to be that.  I did end up getting some laundry done, and I also switched out the kids’ winter and summer clothes (finally).  I also did a sweep of Olivia’s room because it was just horrible.  That girl is such a messy little thing. 

I started feeling better later in the afternoon so we ended up making it to church and then going to our favorite Mexican restaurant for dinner.  After dinner we spontaneously decided to go drive around and look at Christmas lights in our neighborhood to end the evening.  Our neighborhood is HUGE so it took almost an hour to get through the whole thing!

Sunday I woke up feeling much better (although that pain is still there a little… so weird) and I spent the morning planning the next 10 days since they are going to be crazy x 100.  I made a list for each day of things I need to buy, places I need to go, things I’ll need to cook/bake, things I’ll need to bring to different events, and things I need to do, and I feel much less stressed about everything since I got it all down on paper.  I’m hoping it helps things go smoothly this week.  We literally have something going on every single night this week + lots of day events, too, so it’s going to be insane, but in the very best way! 

We had lunch at my MIL and step-FIL’s Sunday afternoon, and then Sunday evening we met my parents, brothers and family, and uncle at our favorite BBQ joint for dinner.  My Momma has a million things going on, too, so she wasn’t trying to spend all day Sunday in the kitchen cooking dinner!

We then wrapped up our Sunday evening with more Christmas light-looking!  We drove around a couple of our favorite neighborhoods in town to see all of the best lights and the kids ate it up, as did I. 

Cheers to the crazy busiest week of the entire year… it should be fun!

Don't forget to link up with Heather, Johannah, and myself... just grab our new Christmas graphic and link up below!

*Linking up with B Loved Boston for Weekending and HoHo Runs for Weekly Wrap.

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