coming up on the dreaded holidays

as i've said before, halloween is my favorite holiday. although i don't always do so, i love dressing up. i love helping the kids pick out costumes or making them. i love candy. i love halloween decorations. i love that you don't give gifts and aren't expected to be the walton's. the last two are the very reasons i dread the upcoming holidays.

we will be going to my parents' house for thanksgiving dinner. this is my bro and sil's year to go to her parents' house for dinner so we won't even have the comfort of them being there. it will be my family and my parents and my sister's family. i am already dreading it. my mom is a horrible cook, worse than me even. my picky kids will eat turkey and/or ham and black olives and rolls. this is partly their fault because they are so damn picky, but also because my mom is a bad cook. in order to provide at least something yummy for them to eat, the hubs volunteered to make the turkey because the one my mom usually makes is dry. as dirt. so much so that the boy even makes comments about it.

so, we will go there and my mom can pretend we're the waltons and that she is this loving mother and grandmother. since the reconciliation, aside from her coming to a few of the girl's soccer games, there really hasn't been any change in our relationship. for the most part i am fine with this because i really didn't want her to assume we were going to be bffs all of a sudden, but i am surprised she hasn't made more of an effort towards my kids. eh...i really shouldn't be surprised. i had to roll my eyes at a post my sister made on fb this morning...she said she is thankful for a mother who loves her kids and grandkids and talked about how much her kids enjoyed spending the weekend w/ her and helping her decorate for christmas. good for her. my mom didn't ask my kids to come over and help, but honestly at this point my kids wouldn't have wanted to anyway.

after thanksgiving we'll have christmas. i do love decorating for christmas and baking cookies and the possibility of snow and christmas music and getting together with my bro and his family. but...this year, since me, my sister and my sil are all unemployed we decided no gifts. for anyone. no exchanging names among the adults or kids. i was all on board with this in my head because i understand the financial ramifications of it. but...i hate it. well...let me clarify...i want to buy gifts for my brother's family. i am a horrible person because i don't like buying gifts for my parents (hard to feel good about giving someone you don't like a gift, especially when months later you find the gift sitting there, unused (which is always the case w/ my dad)). i also don't care so much about giving gifts to my sister and her family. i know that's horrible, but it's just how i feel. the last few years we had drawn names, mostly i think because it got expensive to buy for everyone, even when we had jobs. since my sister has three kids and my brother and i have two, it seemed like i hardly ever got to buy for my brother's kids. that's just wrong.

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and, on a totally different note. in the last few weeks i've done something i should have done eons ago. i've cut our satellite and phone bills. not completely, but significantly. the phone bill was by accident. we have our landline and internet bundled together. when the phone was on the fritz a few weeks ago i was looking up the customer service number online and discovered there was a package rate that was much cheaper than what i was paying. like $20 cheaper. so i had them cut my phone bill. then, this weekend the hubs was investigating netflix. we'd been thinking about it for awhile. we compared what we typically spend in a month at redbox. we looked at the premium channels we have on satellite (which rarely get watched). so, we dropped some channels on satellite and are quitting redbox and getting netflix and still saving money. the hubs set up the netflix to stream through the wii. the technology of this blows my mind. but, it was movie overboard weekend around here. omg. i LOVE movies. LOVE them. but even i got a little sick of watching them. hopefully the excitement will die down. if it doesn't i'll have to put my foot down and limit their viewing pleasure.