Wow, things have heated up on the Italy move. December 16 is still the key date for the work permit, but now we have a targeted start of assignment date – February 1. We also have our “preview” or house-hunting trip scheduled from Jan 11-17. Patrick and Brandon’s first trip to Italy!

I realized today that means there are only 5 usable weeks left to get ready before that – there are 8 weeks total. With two weeks of Christmas break from work, most of that in Colorado, plus a week of house-hunting in Italy, that brings the time to get ready at home and work to only 5 weeks.

It feels incredibly short when I look at it that way! Today at work I started going through a “what MUST get done” list and scheduling it out. We did the same at home, thankfully Patrick will do a lot of that. It is going to be busy, busy, busy though!

OK, by Tuesday I was much better and today even better. It’s been a busy week at work though, because we have visitors here from Italy for meetings so it means more time than usual in meetings and lots of eating. That would be good, if I were a starving waif, but not so good for my current size. Oh well. Tomorrow is the last day of the meetings and then things will be back to normal, but with a lot of catch up to do.

Cute Brandon story…. the other night Brandon says “I love math!” He loves doing addition of 3 and 4 digit numbers, with the carrying. He even got out a piece of paper and made up problems to show us how good he was at it. So much fun! He really has been working hard at math, and it is paying off. It warms my heart to hear him say “I love math!” 🙂

After looking through pictures last night I played around with this one and got inspired to make a scrapbook page. It seems about the only thing that gets me inspired to scrapbook these days is a cute head shot of Brandon. 🙂

I’m home from work today, the cough I’ve been dealing with got really bad last night – waking me up a ton. So here I am taking it easy, and hating it. It is so hard for me to take a day off! There is just so much to do at work. I’m tired and need to go lie down and take a nap though. I know I am sick when can sleep until 10am and then am ready to go back to sleep at 1:30pm. That is just not normal. Zzzzzzzz.

This was what the Oregon Coast looked like this morning. Just Gorgeous! Beautiful, sunny, warm weather. We always luck out at least one day when we go camping at the coast in the winter, and today was the day. Saturday it was overcast and foggy all day, but we had a nice visit to the Aquarium and the Rogue Brewery for my favorite beer cheese soup. Another great camping weekend on the coast. Our trailer is now packed up and winterized, it is likely our last camping weekend before moving to Italy. See more photos at: http://ksloma.multiply.com/photos/album/4

This picture of Beckett says it all! We had a wonderful day with our friends for Thanksgiving. I am thankful for the great life that we are able to have – family, friends and interesting things to do. We have so much, it is nice to have a day to pause and be thankful for it.

It is hard to believe how big all of the kids are getting. Makenna turned 9 in October and Brandon is 7 and a half. They got to use the good china and glasses for Thanksgiving – big kids now!

Today we are getting ready to go camping for the weekend. We haven’t been out in our travel trailer for a few months and this may be the last time before we move. It is supposed to be a nice weekend at the coast. Thanksgiving one day, and still a whole weekend for camping ahead of us – aren’t we lucky!

From us to all of you, we hope that you have a wonderful Thanksgiving with friends and family! We miss being with you on this day. We will be spending it with the Noels, with lots of traditional yumminess all day long! I want to enjoy this day because for the next two years we won’t have the “usual” celebration, and I’ll miss it.

I also wanted to post Brandon’s school picture for this year. I’ll get copies out to family soon.