Hello! I hope your holidays were great. After a lovely, if whirlwind, trip through Paris, we spent one night at home in BK before heading to the greater Philadelphia area, where both of our sets of parents live. We got back to town late last night, after seeing Frozen on Ice with Louisa's grandparents, aunts, uncle and cousins. Seeing the show was a gift from Bret's parents, and the girls loved it.

At first accounting, I'm going to call the attempt at "experience Christmas" a bit of a fail. I think the registry I set up for it wasn't clear for a lot of family members, and I think the impulse to spoil grandkids/nieces and nephews is really too strong to resist. I'm thinking through if and how to make changes next year. For this year, Lou is thrilled with her gifts and truly grateful to her benefactors. She broke open a set of make-your-own cards from her Mom-Mom and Pop-Pop (are those hyphenated?) this morning and has been busily at work making thank you notes.

Meanwhile, today is a big day. Even as we're unpacking our stuff from the trips, we're packing up our Christmas stuff - somewhat reluctantly. Lest any family members think we were exaggerating, here's what our sad, sad, dead tree is looking like.

The tree was so depressingly dead, even before we left for Brooklyn, that Bret took all the ornaments off of it. I would have kept the stuff up longer, but once we were putting the ornaments away, it made sense to put it all up. Uh, yeah, and that's how stellar the rest of our house is looking. Bret and I, deciding that unpacking from three days in Paris, five days in Philadelphia, and two Christmases was not a big enough challenge, stopped by Costco while in Suburbia and added that haul (namely - 48 boxes of cereal) to the list of Things to Put Away. Oh, and we are having people over tomorrow night for New Year's Eve, and hosting Bret's sister in our guestroom then as well. I took current pictures of the guestroom/office but I hesitate to show them now because it's a disaster. Things were going well, but unpacking after a move is both an experience in playing wack-a-mole (i.e., bringing some semblance of order to one area means the chaos will inevitably pop up in another) and the holidays and travel hit, so now it's scary again. I'll work up my courage and show y'all if and when there's a more encouraging "after" shot with which to juxtapose the madness.

All of which to say: we're pretty busy today. So please excuse the lateness and lack of substance in this post, but we'll be back tomorrow! Enjoy your Tuesday.