can you see the plane?

there are things going on here and i'm sure i could write a big rambling post about each thing, but today i'm going to go against my own grain and {gasp!} summarize.  with bullet points, nonetheless.  {to remind myself to summarize.}

• time seems to speed up during the holidays, doesn't it?  if i blink, it feels like yesterday was halloween.  two blinks and i'm sure i will wake up on new year's day.  i want it to slooooow down instead of speed up during this time.  why can't it go faster during the summer when i'm sweating to death?

• i can't get enough of my children at the ages they are at.  caleb is reading full books {not just the readers for his age group} now, and leah is just a sponge, sucking up information at warp speed.  every day she points out the colors of the shirt each person is wearing and she is 95% accurate.  i sneak into their rooms every night to kiss their sleeping faces and whisper i love them.  i have done this ever since caleb was a baby.  there is nothing more angelic than a snoozing child, in my book.  it makes those meltdowns during the day much more bearable.  {sort of.}

• i'm grateful we live in a house that has 3 bathrooms because for the past 2 weeks we have been down 1 of them.  the sunday after thanksgiving we straders decided to break our tradition of decorating for christmas on dec. 23, and while searching for our holiday decorations, made the unfortunate discovery of a leak from the wall of our downstairs bathroom into the closet under our stairs.  several boxes of our things were ruined due to wet mold.  {insert your ewwwww!  here.  i know i sure did.}  luckily we rent from a great property management company who have gotten right on the job.  the carpet has been stripped, the hole has been fixed.  now the next step is the actual replacement of the wall.  it should happen this week, thank heavens.  and yes, for those of you concerned about this rug {which i'm sure is really just me}, luckily it was unharmed during the process of it all.  

• ben is just about to wrap up a killer of a semester.  things have been piled on the man in every sense of the word and i'm grateful he is still alive to tell about it.  he is an amazingly hard worker, which i'm grateful every day for.

• we're just about to celebrate 8 years of marriage.  can you believe it?  blows my mind.  there's a special blog posting coming up for that day, it's already in the works.  it's going to be full of action, sentiment, heartache, joy and love.  or really just be boring to anyone besides myself and ben.  but that's ok.  

• that's about all going on here.  to celebrate the randomness of this post, here is a picture of caleb standing on top of a pile of 5 pillows that are on top of our couch, trying to reach a small airplane that got caught in our ceiling fan.  with leah's "magical star" as she calls it.