The Holiday by the Numbers

This holiday season, Thanksgiving through New year's Day, was the best I can remember since we combined our family units through marriage.
By the numbers, it was far, far calmer than usual, but the numbers are still staggering. Or at least, they left ME staggering and you'll see why knitting was done only for that precious baby born to my cousin.

We won't get into the usual large gatherings for Christmas and Thanksgiving full of truly lovely family here at our house. They didn't happen. Instead we had all those great gigs at other people's houses. Thank you everyone for hosting this year!

Here's the numbers:

We had ONE Thanksgiving this year. Only one. This is a record. And my mom hosted it. Wonderfully. Those of you who know me well will realize that this is a miracle number.

I organized Two book clubs for the school with my good friend Rena and pulled them off without a hitch. We did have to "wing" the second one - it was the Monday after Thanksgiving and we all forgot about it until 3 hours before the meeting. It was the best one ever. Sorry, no pictures...we forgot the camera.

We had Three actual parties hosted at our house between Dec 21st and New Year's day. Not family events, but actual parties.

We had Seven straight days of multi-family bonding with
Eleven children and various and sundry insane adults (myself included of course).

DH and I completed a college course with a very heavy reading load, with excellent grades and we worked together to complete a total of Twenty-Five pages of a project paper at the end (Dec 20th).

Now for the big one: I realize after counting up the number of books read in 2007 that it went to 56. Fifty-six books, not counting the bazillion pages for our class. Check it out here.

That boy with the kisser up top is one of those many family members getting together for that week. We sure had fun, can you tell? That evening, the boys were having fun making faces for the camera. For that photo I had just told his cousin NOT to kiss the camera, so of course he had to give the camera a big smooch! Isn't he full of fun (and beautiful skin!)? They provided me with much laughter and a reason not to help with meal prep for the whole gang for dinner that night.

Last, but not least is the number of balls of yarn I removed from Lady Eleanor: well, I think I'll save that one for another post.