Kate Middleton Day Updates

Happy Kate Middleton Day to all who celebrate. My life is absolute chaos right now, and that's not even taking into account the external chaos of the US's National Day of Mourning for Jimmy Carter today and these horrible, awful, devastating wildfires happening up in LA right now. I hate seeing what's happening.

Well, I have a few minutes to work on some updates, so here you go.

Since I last updated, Sophie had a school performance in which she was just darling and also did amazing! I was expecting her to freeze up but she really was leading the pack in their dance!

We had more Christmas joy by decorating cookies for Santa with our friends...

and I didn't want to give up the tradition I started with Sophie the year before but baking a small batch of our cookies as well.

...and set them out for Santa on Christmas eve, with milk and reindeer carrots.

We had a nice Christmas enjoying our home before going out to see more family in the afternoon. It was a fun, full day.

...and that was the last day of peace that we've had. We planned to get through Christmas as normal as possible, and then after that was straight packing and planning for our move, which has become the most hellish journey I have been on in a while and is still going on. It was amazingly impossible with the girls home, and surviving moving with two young kids at home (also on break) was an amazing feat of strength (which I'm not sure I actually accomplished). But before things got too awful, the girls had a visit from Summer's Padrinos and loved playing in the boxes.

One morning at the zoo and then back to pack

Before moving had happened, I already arranged my outing with Iris to the Warner Bros studio tour to include the trip to Stars Hollow that was ABSOLUTELY. MAGICAL. The warm, cozy, lovely hug that is just watching Gilmore Girls every year was right there, in front of our faces, and we got to wander around and buy so much stuff we couldn't resist and they were playing music from the show and we really felt like we were there and it was just so lovely and calming and heartwarming! Worth every penny, worth the insane traffic we were caught in on the way home. Also, we did trivia at the Black, White and Read movie theatre and I won second place! (I won a $9 magnet that Iris had bought 10 minutes previous lol) 10/10 would recommend, want to return every year! 

We were so early, we found a place nearby
for breakfast and loved this for EVERY reason!

Selenasssssss!

The real Oscar for one of the Lord
of the Rings movies

Lorelai's house!

The mailbox, which included Rory's
acceptance letters from Harvard, Princeton
and Yale!

Lorelai's Jeep!

The gazebo!

Luke's diner!

For some perspective lol

The Independence Inn and sleigh

We were still in the throes of moving on New Year's Eve, but we committed to our new tradition of celebrating live with New York so us with kids can be in bed by midnight lol and it was so much fun! Sophie really caught up to some of these older kids and it's been nice having the older kids run around and play more.

We have spent these first few days of January still moving and settling in. It's nice that the girls are back in their routines, and while AJ and I are also back to work, we spend our evenings still working on the house and will be for awhile, although we're looking forward to the weekends to have more time for it all and make bigger strides. But honestly, we're past the worst of moving and loving this nest of ours.

Happy New Years friends, there is a lot of year left to hopefully bring some wonderful things about, including an end to the fire and working on rebuilding, we'll be looking for opportunities to help and do what we can.