I was right about the vacation. I think I could have used one more day, but I feel much better. Enough to get me through to Christmas, I think.

My Thanksgiving was pretty traditional and I'm thinking I'm getting used to having so many people gone. Part of it is that I'm becoming more antisocial and can only take so much "people time" at once. I have a fantastic family and I love them very much, but sometimes things get too boisterous for me.

The day after Thanksgiving was quite the flashback. We put up Christmas lights and then took old Greenie to pick out a Christmas tree and sang Christmas carols all the way there and back. We forgot how the second verse of Little Drummer Boy started out, so there was much discussion there. I also screwed up the second verse to Away in the Manger, which is really weird because I had that song memorized by the time I was two. Bedtime ritual was a story and a song, and Away in the Manger was a staple. It was quite the shock when I first figured out it was a Christmas song. The only thing missing was Em, but if she'd been there we wouldn't have been able to take Greenie, since we had to perform some acrobatics to get the four of us squeezed in as it was. We were just waiting for a cop to pull us over.

Saturday there was a lunch at Grandma's for my cousin Sonia and her family who were back visiting from Pennsylvania (the ones Lew and I went to visit last spring). Sonia got a new job at a mental health facility, and was entertaining us with stories about her patients, and I think it was Cassie that made the obvious joke about "we always knew you would end up in an institution". Then it was off to Malea's fifth birthday party - for the rest of her life, she is going to hear about the phase she went through where she pretended to be a cat.

Sunday I got my house cleaned, so I'll be able to put up my own Christmas decorations this weekend.

So all in all, it sounds like a pretty busy vacation, but it was just the right balance of busy and relaxing. Lew and I finished off the second season of Angel, and we played a lot of Yoshi Cookie. I wish Dad hadn't been working so much, but at least he took Thanksgiving off this year.

And, I only ate three pieces of pie the entire weekend. Go self-control!