Abby’s Saturday // Four Hundred And Thirty-Five

• Merry Christmas Eve! It’s the official start of the holiday weekend!
• Our house is DONE! After a slight delay due to rain last week – we got back on track this week and HOLY COW I don’t even recognize our house. (In case you haven’t been following along over the last 2 weeks, we had a new roof, gutters, and siding put on our house, plus a new roof put on our garage.)
  We are beyond thrilled with how it all turned out and how it looks!! My Grandpa called me on Wednesday evening (the day everything was officially finished) and said that he and Meme had driven by and they LOVE how it all turned out. He thinks that it easily added at at least 60-70k in value to our house (and I’m sure he’s exactly right).
  Every time I leave and drive back up our street, it catches me off-guard and I just sit there gaping at it as I drive in. I’m in awe of how it all turned out – I’m also in awe of how much work it took to transform our house! I truly had no concept of how long a new roof and siding would take, but Derrick estimated a full 5 days. Well, it took almost double that: a total of 9 days. (I didn’t even realize how much all of the pounding was effecting me until it stopped on Wednesday afternoon and there was suddenly glorious silence!)
  Derrick and I have gone out to look at the house every single evening after the guys have been done working, but the kids only came out to see the progress a few times. So, on Wednesday afternoon, I blindfolded them both and took them out to the sidewalk to see our brand new house. I took a video (duh) – I was expecting excitement and disbelief – I wasn’t expecting sadness though! Leander was excited and instantly ran off to go look at the other sides of the house, but Braelynn started crying. She said she wanted “our old house back” and didn’t like how we’d changed it – not what I was expecting at all!! She’s still coming around to it – poor kid. I guess it’s all she’s ever known for her entire life, so we drastically changed her home and she was quite confused.
  (Thankfully, the work got wrapped up before this INSANE cold-front moved in! YIKES! Temps yesterday bottomed out at -3º – yes that was the ACTUAL temperature! The real feel was down around -25º – what even is that?! Today the cold front will begin to lift – we should see a high in the teens today – heat wave!)
• I wrapped all of our gifts at the very beginning of this week – yikes. It took me two nights and about 5 hours total – YIKES. I am not really a huge “wrapping” person (it’s too much like folding laundry). But I must say: it felt marvelous to be done with that monumental task by Tuesday!!
• Braelynn went shopping for a few gifts last week and she wrapped them all (by herself) on Sunday night. She made a comment about how she had gotten a gift for Leander, but she wondered if he would have a gift for her? So, when I was wrapping the kids’ gifts on Monday night, I pulled out something small he could give her. I showed it to him on Tuesday morning and asked him if he wanted to give it to Braelynn for Christmas. He got super excited and said, “Yes!” so we wrapped it up and put her name on it. He was so excited, he wanted to put it under the Christmas Tree in her bedroom. She wasn’t awake yet, so he snuck into her room and placed it there. Of course, as soon as she woke up, he had to very excitedly show her the gift under her tree. (Braelynn got so excited that she grabbed Leander in a massive bear hug.) Then Leander proceeded to tell her: “It’s tiny squishmallows.” Oops. I guess we need to work on the “keeping presents a secret” part of gifting. She laughed and promised that she would still act surprised on Christmas morning.
• So, I’m not sure if you caught that or not – but I just casually mentioned the fact that on Tuesday, Leander was awake before Braelynn. That was not just Tuesday – that’s become a new, regular occurrence. Somehow (with the cold’s arrival) Braelynn has turned into more of a sleeper and Leander has taken her place as the early-riser. Braelynn has ALWAYS been my “up by 6am” kid and Leander has ALWAYS slept in until at least 7am (usually past that). But over the last few weeks, they’ve switched. Leander is now consistently up around 6am and Braelynn consistently sleeps until at least 7am. How does this happen and how can I make them BOTH sleep until at least 7am??
• We baked Christmas cookies all day Monday and Tuesday. Braelynn has always “wanted” to help with cookies, but after a few moments, she usually gets distracted and runs off to play. This year, she actually actively helped me through most of the baking process! We talked all about measurements, reading recipes, following steps, and baking temperatures. It was so much more fun with a little companion!
  On Wednesday evening, we delivered plates of cookies to our neighbors! We’ve sent cookies to our neighbors for every years in a row now and it’s turned into quite a fun Christmas tradition (Braelynn loves delivering the cookies! She’s so social and our neighbors are so sweet to her all year long – so she sees it as her Christmas gift to them!
• I’ve been slowly working on our Adventuring Abbeys highlight video from this year. It’s been a fairly monumental task! Last year’s highlight video was about 10 minutes long, the year before’s was around 13 minutes long, so my goal for this year was less than 15 minutes (but spoiler alert – it ended up being 20 minutes long – OOPS!) We visited 18 parks this year, plus 3 water parks – I literally have hours upon hours of footage. We had the most amazing, magical, wonderful year, and so condensing it down to a simple highlight video is HARD. But I did it! The video will go live tomorrow – go subscribe to my YouTube channel so you’ll see it!!
• We’ve gotten TWO packages this week that were obviously Christmas gifts, but not ours! The first package’s address was clearly wrong – both the address the sender put on the package AND the address the post office put on (they were different and while they were close to our address, they weren’t 100% ours either). Derrick took that package back to the post office and let them take care of re-delivering it. The second was an Amazon package, that again, was close to our address, but not 100% right. I contacted Amazon about that one and they said we could keep the package and they’d contact the sender to get the address corrected. The kids were excited to see that inside the package was some fidget balls, a dinosaur stacking game, and a spelling activity set!

Take a stroll down memory lane & see the past Abby’s Saturday Christmas photos!
2021 | 2020 | 2019 | 2018 | 2017 | 2016 | 2015