Let the celebration begin!

This is the week -- the celebration that Katherine has been looking forward to for about a year now! LOL!! She turns 4 on Saturday, and is just giddy with excitement! She can't wait!! We are having celebrations all week long -- starting tomorrow at playgroup and ending next Sunday morning in Sunday school. She is having birthday party celebrations with her preschool class, our Friday morning playgroup, the girls in her ballet class, her Sunday school class, and a big family and friend party Saturday night at 5. What a week she's going to have!

We have finally started to recover from this past Thursday's snowstorm. What a mess! We had a good inch of ice coating everything, and then about 4 inches of snow on top of the ice... Normally, not terrible, but the winds were insane. It took Matt forever to get home from work on Thursday and he ended up taking the side streets because the interstate was incredibly icy and he couldn't see anything due to white out conditions. Everything was shut down on Friday, and for the first time since I've been in Des Moines, that included downtown employers. Aviva (where Matt works) was even closed all day! We were planning on going to LeMars this weekend, but since all roads north and west of Des Moines were closed, we didn't go....

Oh -- I have BIG NEWS!! Friday night we went over to Rick and Danyel's house (she's the one who lives two doors down and sells Silpada). We decided to play cards, so Danyel got a babysitter to entertain the kids. THIS WAS THE FIRST TIME MY KIDS HAVE HAD A BABYSITTER!! Steph, my niece, has watched them twice, but other than my parents or in-laws, that was it. So we had our first "third party" baby sitter. Rick and Danyel use these two 18 year old girls who work in their daycare. Since they are best friends, they always come together. So there were four kids with two 18 year old girls who are CPR certified and work in a daycare -- AND we were upstairs playing cards, within earshot of everything that was going on, and I was nervous!! I almost couldn't do it.... I know, I know... I'm psycho! But, they had a blast, so that's all that matters. OH -- and to make it even better -- I was the Texas Hold-Em Champ! WOO-HOO!! Can I just tell you how wonderful it is to take your husband's $$? Love it!! LOL!

Matt and I ventured out on Saturday to get some take-out -- Cool Basil for us, and a steak from Texas Roadhouse for the kids. We had a good laugh on the way home. It was fine in West Des Moines, but as soon as we crossed in the interstate into Johnston, it was like a different world! We must live in the boonies! There's so much open space that the wind just whipped through and blew the snow everywhere. At times we couldn't even see the road.... Even now, it's dangerous turning out of our development. There is so much snow piled up on the side of the roads, that I can't see over it to watch for cars... UUUUGH! And one of our neighbors has such a huge drift in his front yard that you can barely see the front door. Andrea and Carolyn both had to miss Friday morning playgroup because they couldn't get out of their driveway...

Is there a silver lining to all this snow??? Of course! Because of the mountain snow and the fact that we couldn't go to LeMars, I met up with Kelly and hit the grand opening of my favorite store -- TJ MAXX! As predicted, they had Waterford lamps (which I didn't buy...) and the store was stocked full of great stuff. I couldn't believe how many people were there. I could barely move my cart around the store! It was insane. I found out that they had 27 people working in the store that day whose ONLY job was to keep refilling the shelves. Can you imagine? They had 10 lines open that you could check out, and there was a line (amusement park style) probably 10 or 15 deep. Insane! I didn't buy that much, but it was still fun!