I hope you had a wonderful Christmas, Hanukkah, Holiday or just time spent with good friends and family. We had a great day with an unexpected visit from my Mom. (I think she’s relieved I didn’t buy her the 23″ x 14″ box . affiliate link)

It was especially sweet to see her since we had lied to the boys and told them we were going to see her in Virginia when in actuality we were headed to Orlando to Disney and Universal Studios. We wanted to see how long it would take them to figure out we were driving the wrong way. My oldest finally asked to see how far we were on our trip via Google Maps and exclaimed that we were halfway into South Carolina. After a brief performance where we acted surprised and angry that we drove the wrong way, we pulled over and gave each boy a gift cluing them in to our actual destination. As you can imagine they were both super excited and thoroughly surprised.

Now that Christmas day is behind us, I have holed myself up at the beach for a few days. I have less than two weeks before I am scheduled to take the Residential General Contractor exam. I am stressed, and I am in no way near as prepared as I’d like to be at this point. One of the best Christmas gifts I received was Pretty Handsome Guy suggesting I take four days to go to the beach and study uninterrupted. I love that he’s the type of husband that 1) supports my goals 2) is completely capable of playing the single parent role for a while and 3) will probably have more fun with the boys than if the disciplinarian (aka Mom) was around.

With that said, I’ll be spending more time studying and less time online until after January 8th. See you in 2016!