Special Day

I had such a special day today, but I'll get to that in a minute...Gramma and Pap Pa Gerren came down yesterday in preparation for the special day today and were able to spend yesterday afternoon with us, and they just had a ball with Kellen, of course! Gramma is sometimes more of a kiddo than her grandson, and brought some early Christmas presents for him to open, and he LOVED THEM! He got a Winnie the Pooh 3-D puzzle, and I had never even seen those kind of puzzles before! They are so cool! We've determined that Kellen is a puzzle king...he's just a genius at some of these puzzles that he shouldn't be able to put together yet...really! They also brought him some Veggie Tales figures from the Jonah story, which I don't think he's put down since he opened...he even had them watch him eat dinner last night & tonight and took them to daycare with him today. He got a snowman snow-globe and some sort of snowman singing gun thing...not quite sure what to call the latter...and two Christmas books. Unfortunately for the books, they came after the Veggie Tales, so he really didn't care one thing about them since he was too busy playing with Twippo and Junior, but he'll read them later, I'm sure...

As for today, it was a great day! The awards ceremony for the President's Meritorious Service Award was this morning, and it was so nice to have my parents and Matt's folks there for my cheering section...I had lots of other folks there for support as well, so I don't want to leave anyone out, but it was just a really nice day. The awards ceremony went really smoothly (except that I just wanted the video that Matt took with the digital camera and realized that I didn't shake Dr. Gates' hand again at the end of the comments before I went to sit down and it looked like he was trying to shake my hand and congratulate me again...Whoops!) Then Matt, his parents & I went to lunch at Cheddars and had a wonderful lunch...topped off with the Cookie Monster dessert(YEAH!!! - I just LOVE that dessert & it's such a treat!!!). So it was a leisurely day and lunch...I was nice to myself and had scheduled my freshman on Friday for their pre-registration appointments and only had one appointment on my calendar for 3 PM today...



Back to the office after a late lunch to actually work for a few hours and the day was virtually gone...worked a little late and tried to prioritize what needed to get done for tomorrow (I'm trying to implement some of the skills from a workshop I attended last week - Balancing Work & Family - we'll see how that goes). Kellen and I played for a little while with his new puzzle and Veggie Tales after we got home and I tried to counteract the effects of the grandparents schedule (you know...things get a little off-schedule when the grandparents are here - he was up until at least 9 PM last night...but it's ok) by getting him in bed pretty much at 7:30 PM on the dot...he was so tired tonight! Although he fussed while getting ready for bed, I didn't even have to go into his room once to tell him to turn the light off...I think he just crashed once he actually laid down!

My goal for the rest of the evening...work on addressing Christmas cards...wish me luck!