I am a lazy hermit

I have logged into blogger three days running to read and comment on all the recent blog posts and to write a post of my own. And, nope. Nothing. I am going to attribute this to my natural laziness. That and an inclination to be as antisocial as possible in winter. Isn't that terrible? But it is true. When we lived in Alaska I thought it was just a fact of life. The summer, with tons of sun (or lack of darkness--there were a couple weeks when the sun refused to shine...) we had a busy social calendar. When November hit, things dried up a lot. An occasional supper here, a New Years party there, an occasional sewing night.... But pretty much, we all stayed in until the sun started reappearing in March. There were the exceptions to this rule, particularly anyone with the means to go away, as in far away, from Alaska for a week or two. Still, this habit has stuck. I don't want to travel in winter. I go to town once a week if I can get away with it. I check facebook once in awhile, to make sure no one has died or procreated without my knowledge. And apparently, I blog very rarely.

With all this free time, you would think I would be a wonder with crafts, dusting odd corners, letter writing, organizing socks by color, etc. But no. I read, I sleep, I cuddle babies, I play piano, and then I start all over again.  Lately, little nudges of guilt have crept in to overshadow my self-centered existence. I SHOULD be doing more. But it is winter.  And I am pregnant. And whiny. If I had more energy, I would start a self-improvement plan immediately. As it is, I guess I will just have to wait patiently for the sunshine of spring to awaken my sense of duty. Until then, don't expect much more than vacant stares from me.

My one accomplishment in the past week or so is getting my 2011 photo book done. Shutterfly had a 50% sale, so this was the cheapest year I have photo booked so far. It also helped that I was in mid-October, on track for getting all 1,300 pictures to fit in the 101 pages they allow per photo book when Shutterfly informed me I could only add 13 more pictures to my photo book. They have a 1,000 photos per photo book limit. How dare they! So I had to go through and winnow out a couple hundred pictures so I could conclude the year. Apparently they aren't planning on people cramming an entire years worth of pictures into one book.  Or at least prolific picture taking people.

The point of that is I realized I haven't done much in the way of posting pictures for quite awhile. So I am going to post some. Man, I really can't just DO things can I? Yap, yap, yap. Some of these pictures are from the beginning of November until before Christmas. I will do Christmas pictures tomorrow. I will. Seriously.

Gilbert, diversifying his musical ability by playing the mouth organ upside down

A passel of kids

Owen and Ashley's house. In November. It has progressed a lot since then.

My construction guy

Mary and Ethan

Yeah, he makes me nervous

Cheyenne being fascinating apparently

Sunday after-meeting kids

The Down Syndrome Christmas party

Gilbert is not a big Santa fan. 

(By the way, has it ever struck you how credit stealing Santa is? The Down Syndrome Society bought all these presents, asked Santa to come, and then, during the whole present thing, this Santa chappie gets all the credit for making and wrapping the presents. Graciously tells people they are welcome to his presents. Same with parents who go broke buying presents and then some mythical dude in red is who the kids thank.)  

Yep, they're my cowgirls

Dad thought this was fabulous. Owen didn't so much. So we have a hippie with a negative attitude and some kind of  mafia gangster in the back, but the front row looks marginally western.

Boys and guns

And then the kids wanted in on the action

This is breakfast at our house. We believe in hats.

Our stomach bug. A dazed Gilbert with a popsicle. 

And there are some random pictures. Random pictures that make me feel more organized for getting them up here in chronological order. Well somewhat anyway. The Thanksgiving pictures I posted ages ago happened somewhere in amongst all these pictures, but there is no sense in being overly particular about these things....