Oh Canada

What a fun morning...I sat down at my computer this morning, amid chaos and moving boxes, and pulled up my friend's blogs, which I love to do to find out if anyone has done anything new. What a joy to find that almost everyone had posted a fun new update over the weekend! Halloween pics of some of my favorite kiddos on the planet, gorgeous photo reminders of God's grace, fun news about trips taken, general updates about the lives of those I love, but don't get to see nearly as often as I'd like. Thanks, dear ones, for making my morning!

Kevin and I ran away from home this weekend. We realize that in a few weeks it's going to get much more complicated to do that. We threw everything we needed in one suitcase (yes, I know, those days are SERIOUSLY almost over), and caught a flight to Vermont. From there we rented a car and drove north to Montreal. Neither of us had ever been to Canada, and we had some free hotel nights that were slated to expire by the end of the year.

Every year feels as if on October 1st I'm standing on top of a mountain looking down on my favorite time of year...the holidays! I love EVERYTHING from October 1 to January 8 (our wedding anniversary). Then, just as I'm taking a deep breath and preparing to enjoy this fantastic time of year, someone gives me a huge shove from behind, and I am rolling down this mountain. Faster and faster the days fly by, the weekends fill up, the holidays whiz past....and I slam into a tree at the bottom of the hill, stand up, shake myself off, and realize it's mid-January and it's over. I have nothing to look forward to now but 4 more months of rather dreary winter weather without all the fun. Granted, we do have something to look forward to this year around the beginning of February, but that doesn't mean my fall is moving any slower. In fact, it's actually busier -- Kevin's sister is getting married at Thanksgiving, I'm having a baby shower in Dallas in December, and before all of that, we're moving.

Needless to say, a girl could use a break.

So, Friday night we drove into Montreal. The weather was positively frigid! We had dinner on Friday night at French brasserie not far from our hotel, and then crashed. Saturday we had brunch at this fantastic place called Great Eggspectations, where they do more things then you could possibly imagine with eggs. We spent the rest of the day following a walking tour of Old Montreal that I printed online. Every 10 minutes or so we would duck into some gallery or tacky souvenir shop to try to thaw out, as it never got out of the 30s. It was frosty and fantastic! The whole weekend was low key -- sleeping 12 hours a night (yes, I know, another thing we're going to kiss good-bye very soon), eating fantastic food, wandering around parts of the city, stumbling through my lousy French. (If you've ever seen any clips from Flight of the Conchords, we sang Foux Da Fa Fa all weekend.)

Now I'm back home, again surrounded by stacked moving boxes and chaos. I've gotta make some progress, as we are hoping this move will happen on Friday. I'm going to be really glad when this is over. I've found that moving is a much more complicated proposition when you're pregnant. Not that I'm all that big, but it's just a little more physically challenging. I am so getting a massage when all this madness is over!