Keeping Busy

We got lucky a few weeks ago when Ez was told that he has too many hours built up for vacation and he needed to take another week off of work by the end of the year. Bummer. Since he already had the week of Thanksgiving off, he took off the week prior as well, giving us a good 2 weeks with dad on vacation.

It has been really nice to have him home. The kids have loved seeing him so much! Joe has particularly loved it and has been Ez's little shadow much of the time. Ez had to actually go in one night last week and poor Joe cried himself to sleep on the couch because he missed dad so much.

Another rather important reason we've been thankful to have dad home is that there has been a long "to do" list around the house that we have finally started to whittle away at. Forget the time off work to relax, right? Time for work at home!! All of our pictures are officially re-hung (from when we repainted 6 months ago). Our curtain in our room is up, which we bought about 4 months ago! Things have been moved and tidied that mom couldn't do on her own. We spent two days last week cleaning up the yard--trimming trees, cleaning up the annoying apples that fall into our yard from our neighbor, the general kind of stuff you do before the weather gets too cold and rainy.

Joe had a great time helping in the yard. We found a cute little lizard that he enjoyed chasing and holding and scaring for a little bit. He passed Ez the branches we had trimmed so we could chop them and put them in the recycling bin. Evie was less helpful. She mostly had fun running around with no shoes on, making her socks and dirty as possible--and hanging on to a random pair of goggles!