The Birthday Girl

Well, today is my lovely wife's birthday. We celebrated with dinner at the Cheesecake Factory. I am afraid we don't really do much on the gift end for each other's birthdays. She asked about getting something a week or two ago and I told her I didn't know exactly which camera lens she wanted (she wants another lens) so she was supposed to email me some information. I guess she hasn't decided exactly what lens she wants though so no email came through. Yes, that is how romantic we are about gifts, "Hey, email me what you want ..." I guess that works out okay for us. Let's face it, the other things I have heard her talk about all fall into the kitchen pot/pan/appliance realm and I will NOT buy anything like that for her as a gift.

Sometime I will do a nice write-up about her first birthday after we got married. I had a wonderful little surprise planned and let's just say, it didn't work out well. No more surprises like that for the Birthday Girl, yeah, that's how well it worked out. I would write it up now, but I suppose I should hold off and tell her that my NOT telling about it is her birthday present for this year.

Yesterday DS#3 completely refused to nap. He is hitting the age when DD decided to give up naps too. Unfortunately, just like DD, he NEEDS a nap if he is going to be able to cope in the evenings. After yesterday I knew that he would positively have to nap today in order for us to enjoy dinner. This morning he was already acting a bit tired before we ran off to the gym, then to Target, and on to Chick-Fil-Et for lunch before going to Gymboree for playtime. We got back a little after noon and yes, he did take a nap today, a nice long nap. He still woke up very cranky though. He made it through dinner so the nap was a good thing. Now that I think about it, I probably needed a nap too.

My folks are coming to SA tomorrow sometime. They plan to spend a few days in the New Braunfels (a little ways northeast) to look at houses around that area and get an idea of what living around there might be like. They are getting very serious about moving here to SA and we are loving the idea. It will be great for the kids to see their grandparents more often. I guess they'll be staying here at the house with us starting Sunday or so. One of my sisters will be coming here from Boston to spend the holiday here too. She'll be arriving on Christmas Eve. We are all looking forward to it. DD is going to be all over her aunt, she just worships her.

The Salvation Army is going to come tomorrow afternoon to pick up some old furniture and a few other things that I have set aside. I definitely need to get some things cleared out so we have more space in the house. They were supposed to come last week but supposedly the truck broke down and they had to change the schedule. At least they called me to re-schedule so I didn't have to hang around the house. They give such a broad time window that there really are only a few days a week that I can try to have them come. I guess if they don't make it tomorrow I am just going to have DS#1 help me load things into the van and drive them up to the Goodwill.

The next thing we need to do is gather up the kids old toys and take them off to the children's shelter. I have proposed simply taking a full 1/3-1/2 of the toys at random but that didn't go over well with anyone, including my wife. I should probably keep the plan of simply shoveling things out of the game room into garbage bags to myself. Something pretty draconian is going to have to happen sometime after Christmas. Like all children these days, the kids have far more toys and games than they actually use so we are going to have to do something about the clutter.

I am getting ready to start a list of the things I want to do with the house/yard for next year. It will be easy, first, I will start with the list of things from this year that I still haven't gotten done yet ... Anyway, the top of the list is going to be getting some painting done inside and new carpet for the upstairs. This year I had the exterior of the house repainted, had some repairs done inside the garage, had new wood floors put in much of the downstairs, got a nice new TV, new entertainment center, new patio/deck furniture, and pretty much did my best to single-handedly keep the economy rolling. We'll have to see what next year brings.