stuff is cool

Thanksgiving is suddenly almost upon us! I hate how autumn and winter fly by but spring and summer (mostly summer) drag on forever. I am not sure how I can still feel like the holidays fly by when the rest of the word starts the season a full month before I do. Merchants had their Christmas decorations and displays up the week of Halloween.

Now, I LOVE Christmas. I love everything about it. I love decorating, shopping for gifts, cooking, watching Christmas movies, listening to Christmas carols, etc. But I will not start doing those things until the day after Thanksgiving! Or maybe Thanksgiving Day. Even though I have been running into holiday stuff left and right for weeks, I have fought it off enough that when I do officially greet The Season, it will be all the richer and sweeter. You start doing Christmas too early and it gets really watered down.

Some people go to the other extreme. In Olden Days, sometimes Santa brought the tree along with the gifts. Or the tree was set up only on Christmas eve. This makes sense due to the fire hazards they were, what with being decorated with dozens of open flames and all! In any case, some folks out there don’t celebrate The Season, they celebrate the day.

Obviously, I prefer the happy medium. 4 weeks of Christmas is just enough time to build up the excitement and celebration, savoring each tradition one by one. It may start with an impulse purchase of Christmas Oreos with red and green icing, then lighting holiday scented candles, then decorating, etc. etc. until Christmas is everywhere, exciting all of your senses.

I think the timing of holidays is perfect. We build excitement for a month, then have wonderful wonderful Christmas, with the week afterward acting as the denoument, and, just in time, New Years is a solid bookend (paired with Thanksgiving.)

Heyyyyyy bet you guys thought we had given up on our blog forever. Yeah, well, we sorta had I guess. I am not sure why I haven’t been keeping it up. It’s just that I am soooooo busy (haha.)

In fact I haven’t read *anyone’s* blog in months. I really really have no idea why. It’s like I just plain forgot about the blogosphere. Which would seem impossible, but it can be done!

I was replying to an email from Petie and I clicked on her family blog and was just so enchanted with reading about the daily adorableness of my little nieces that I could not believe I had missed out on so much. I have LOTS of reading about JoJo and Lisey to catch up on! And I know nothing about my precious, um, what would he be, nephew-in-law-in-law? Petie’s brother Joey and his wife Maria have sweet baby Joaquin. I am hoping to reconnect with Maria and hear all about the little prince!

Hmm sounds like I have babies on my mind. Kiinda. I mean, it’s gonna happen within a few years, and we are getting closer to BabyTime as each day, week, month, year passes. Danny and I talk about our plans for our future children allll the time. I think we’ve sort of got a plan figured out, though of course it’s not totally up to us, we have to work on God’s plan for us. BUT, we figure we’d of course rather be in a house first, a starter house, of course. However, if we don’t move into a house until age 32 or something (however unlikely) obviously the baby would have to come before that.

Danny has always been figuring on age 30 being “it’s time.” But that’s only two years away! EEek!

I don’t want to make this first return to blogging to turn into a novel, so I’ll shaddup for now I can’t type for very long because of my wrists getting sore from it, but maybe more typing is the right exercise I need!

If you forgot what we looked like, here’s a recent pic of Mr. and Mrs. Daniel DiPaolo. Nah, I just like sharing pics.

Not our Halloween costumes, BTW. What sort of costume is a bathrobe anyway? This pic is from the ROBE 2008 party we attended during Danny’s company retreat weekend. That party got preeety weird. The mask I am wearing was from another, MUCH more formal and elegant event going on in the main ballroom. I snagged this off a table as we walked by the ballroom. Then later, this random girl and I went back to the ballroom, now empty, and took down a bunch of fancy masks that had been used as decoration. I cannot believe i was running around the hotel in my jammies. Maybe I shouldn’t have had so much champagne. Man, Danny’s company is really really cool.

Below is another picture from that weekend, but we have more clothes on.