Wrapping up our Christmas break

I scheduled the whole week following New Year's as a week off from school, with designs on getting the house scrubbed, my desk sorted and reorganized, and several other organization projects accomplished...but we spent it sick instead!  Oh well, at least we had the week off and could curl up under blankets with our books, without the stress of getting behind in school!  Here are a few "odds and ends" pictures...

The kids and I squeezed in time before Christmas for a refreshing visit with Karen and Noah.  She surprised them with supplies to make gingerbread Christmas trees and they thoroughly enjoyed themselves.

 While my parents were here, my mom and I made new flannel pajamas for me.  Well, we started making them together...and as the day progressed, I came down with THE VIRUS and ended up napping while my mom finished the pjs...moms are wonderful!  I was so happy to have comfy new pajamas to wear while I was sick. :)  

 A little backstory on these...they are now affectionately known as my "Big Browns".  The original pair of pajamas from this same pattern was a pair my mom made for me when I was a teenager, and when I wore them, my brothers called me Big Green.  The name stuck and eventually we referred to the pajamas as their own personage -- Big Greens.  That pair wore out eventually and the replacement was another pair in the same exact fabric.  Those wore out a couple of years ago and I just finally got around to replacing them with this pair...and so the joy lives on!  I've missed them!

When we weren't on the couch reading and watching movies, we did some puzzles...

 ...and took our medicine. :)  This is David doing his nebulizer for the pneumonia/asthma he is currently battling.

 Pictures are -- quite understandably, I should think -- lacking from this last week.  We weren't pretty sights!  Here is a cute picture I stole from my mom's blog, though, of Abigail and Samantha in the matching nightgowns my mom made for them.  Abigail is still not over the excitement of matching her doll at bedtime every night!

 (My mom has a great recap of our Christmas together here.)

We're still nowhere near 100%, but we are back to school today, albeit it at a slower pace than normal.

Despite the change in plans, we still enjoyed our time off...after all, "home" and "together" makes any time off a good thing!