Five Things Friday

Five Things That Made Me Smile This Past Week

1. Every year, I usually wait until last minute to get everything together. Everything from wrapping presents, to shopping, to baking/cooking. This is the first time in 6 years where I am fully prepared and finished with wrapping, with shopping with time to spare. HOORAY!
2. This past week, I started my training for the Avon Walk for Breast Cancer. Now that the Madore-ables are not napping I can't work out in the afternoon...however they do go down to bed early as a result so I have the option of working out at night, or waking up early. Feel free to check out my Training Page (underneath the "In It To End It" tab) to see how I'm doing!
3. I haven't baked Christmas cookies since I was about 6 years old. I wanted to wait until both the Madore-ables were old enough. Last weekend, the Madore-ables had two opportunities to decorate cookies and they had an absolute BLAST! Seriously, had I known they were going to love cookies and decorating I would have done this a long time ago! (Thanks to Tina & Kristina for testing the idea out for me ahead of time!) Today is my baking day, so I know Samantha is going to be in absolute heaven.
4. I've had a lot of time to reflect in the last month or so. I can remember when I was a kid my most exciting Christmas was when my parents bought me my first bicycle. I can remember to this day riding the bike around in my parents unfinished basement. Back in the day I didn't know the effort that went into those kinds of gifts. Last week we introduced the idea of writing a letter to Santa/Saint Nick. It was nice to see Sam get excited over what she would like. Jeremy and I have decided to not exchange gifts to each other, and instead we decided to budget and spend that money on the Madore-ables. I was very teary eyed wrapping the girls gifts seeing that we were able to get some of Samantha's requests :)
5. Sarah is doing such a fantastic job with her speech and increasing her vocabulary each day it seems. This past week, Sarah has really made Mommy and Daddy proud: she's saying "please" and "thank you" without much prompting. Actually, to you and me it's "please" and "thank you" to Sarah it comes out as "peeeeeease" and "Kay-q" or "No kay-q".