A Scrap of Life

Halloween has come and gone and it was a long, fun day. It was nice to be a Saturday this year, as it stretched the holiday out a bit. I had parties at the preschool on Thursday and Friday, where I dressed as a kitty. The kids had parties at school on Friday and dressed for those. Tristan and Carissa went as a vampire and vampiress. Chase had a last-minute change of heart and decided to dress up. He went as a doctor. Tonight was trick-or-treating and the younger two were very into it. Chase wasn't so much. Grandma Imlah flew home from Wendy's house in time to spend Halloween night with them. We all went out for a while but Brian and I soon returned home to hand out candy and let Grandma finish trick or treating with the kids. Happy Halloween all!

The excitement is building and our Disneyworld vacation is quickly approaching. I was giddy when I picked up the mail today and received our very first piece of Disney vacation documents - our luggage tags and boarding passes for Disney's Magical Express. Wahoo!!!

Me: "What do you want to be when you grow up?" Carissa: "A vet." Me: "Even with the blood?" Carissa: "I forgot about the blood. Really, I just want to be a bat rescuer." Me: "Why a bat rescuer?" Carissa: "I read this story about Australia and the Mom bats are dying because they get bit by a tick and it makes them die. There's a place they take the baby bats to rescue them. I want to work there and save the baby bats."

In June Brian and I sat down and crunched the numbers, calculated how much we'd saved and how much we'd need. Perfect timing, as Disney sent us a special offer for free dining in December. So we decided that we could finally afford the dream of seeing DisneyWorld in it's Christmas splendor. Hopefully it will look something like this: We're so excited to be going but, of course, I get in planning mode. I've searched and scoured and am as prepared as I think I possibly can be at this point. We've got dinner reservations at all the appropriate places, have flights and are soooooo excited to be staying in one of the Disney hotels this time (our first time ever!). So the planning has kept me busy, especially when compounded with work, scouts, taekwondo, cheer and swimming, all of which are happening this month. It's busy, but I'm counting down the days (43!) until we leave for sunny Florida. Beyond that, not much new here. We've had the sickies around th...