Early December

 

I hang banners for various exciting days throughout the year. We have a Birthday Banner, and a Christmas Banner, and  New Year's banner, and a Thanksgiving banner, and so on and so forth. Rose decided to get into the action this year by making a "Black Friday" banner, which is adorable.

Random picture of all our desserts for Thanksgiving.

Sarah painted this. Yes, my girls are amazing artists.

We have this cute little spot out the back door which is usually quite a bit warmer than elsewhere when it is sunny; the wind is blocked by walls, and the sunlight reflects and it is cozy. Also, the cats like Isaac.

Our sun room has writing all over it from our days with small people who wrote on walls. Joseph is heroically working on cleaning it.

Sarah got a diamond painting craft for her birthday. 

Sarah is tall.

In other news, we published another book. Yes, that is crazy but... I finished Elizabeth Bennet's Inheritance in early October and immediately settled down to write a Christmas story which, as I said in my last post, I finished last week. We published two days ago. It is shorter than my usual books but doing well so far.

In other interesting news, Joseph is now a monetized youtuber. Youtube pays people if they have more than 1000 subscribers and over 4000 (I think) watching hours of the channel. He does these incredibly complex mods (modifications) of a game called Terraria. He has taught himself how to code and change things like how the villains interact and so on. He has been doing this for several years, and last week a particular video went viral among the Terraria community. He quickly soared above the requisiste 1000 subscribers and is now over 2000 subscribers!

It is exciting and will provide a little bit of income for him. Not enough for him to quit his day job -- not that he has one now, as he is studying for IT certification, but still, very fun!

We have some minor illness moving through the house. I am very tired and have been having peculiar dreams. Other than that, mostly Ok thankfully.

December is frankly a little stressful for me; we have three birthdays to celebrate, and Christmas too. But times they are changing. The children can do a lot of the work (like putting up the Christmas tree) and Kevin has graciously taken care of the purchasing of the presents. So I can just enjoy myself, and I intend to!

Oh, one last thing! The biggest concern for both Kevin and me about him quitting his job was finding health insurance. Thanks to Obamacare, we are signed up for a Blue Cross Blue Shield insurance plan starting in January which will be very managable, and which includes dental and vision. We will have to change dental offices unfortunately, but it is still awesome to have that sorted out.