It's beginning to look alot like Christmas

Just not a white one yet unfortunately.

Good news though, Parker is done with his jury duty.  It lasted 8 days with him not getting home until almost 8pm every night and one night not getting home until 1230am!  But it is done - we survived and now we can scramble for Christmas.

Better news - my back is almost back to normal.  Still not 100% but I can pretty much function now and that is a huge difference from a week ago so, Phew.

This past Friday was Joe's birthday so the four of us went up there on Saturday for a get together.  Rowan and Lily made a recording singing Happy Birthday to him.  Very cute and he loved it.  Saturday was also the Dads Breakfast with Santa at Rowan's school.  Parker was a volunteer and had to be there at 6am!  Breakfast was between 8-11 so the girls and I made it over there around 930 and stayed until about 1045 or so.  We ate, the girls made some crafts, talked to Santa and generally ran around having a great time and loving the fact that their dad was involved in everything.

Yesterday was raining on and off and after figuring out what all we had to do to prepare for Christmas still and what we wanted to do with the kids we decided yesterday would be a good day for a train ride.  We took McKenzie with us and grabbed the train down to the city to see the light show at Macy's.

The kids had a great time on the train.  We got to the city about half an hour before the show started so we walked the couple of blocks to Macy's and grabbed our spot on the 3rd floor for the best view.  The show starts on the hour, every hour, and lasted about 12 minutes.  It was cute - alot of hype that it maybe does not live up to for adults but the three kids we had loved it and oohed and ahhed along the way.

Also on the 3rd floor Macy's has something called the Dickens Village - I thought it would be like Byer's Choice with doll displays depicting the story but I was wrong.  These were large animatronics that led you through the whole thing.  It was really good - so good in fact we went through it twice!

After that we walked over to the Reading Terminal Market to try and grab some lunch but it was packed and trying to watch three kids amongst a surging crowd was a little nerve wracking so we headed back out and went to the Field House attached to  Market St East.  That made us right near the train home, so a few stores later we were back on the train and on the way home.