Sick Days and Freezing Tailgates.

Seth's leg had been bothering him again, enough so that he spent the week voluntarily back in the wheelchair. Never a good sign. 

The holidays are almost upon us, our schedule is wacky and has included lots of football season house guests and a housekeeper on hiatus, some big investigations at work have blown up and required lots of late nights and early mornings... so naturally, the same day that Seth found out he needed to have another surgery at Walter Reed ASAP, Ford projectile vomited all over his classroom at daycare.

It never rains but it pours. 

Ford felt better the next day and terrorized my office, ensuring I got no work done but deeply enjoying his lunch of french fries and viewing of all of Finley's favorite cartoons.

It's been a week, for sure. We did find time to send off good friends leaving for Australia with a raucous toddler party that included the making of their own "recipes."

And end-of-evenings that looked like this.

We enjoyed our last CSA basket of the season. (Finley said "take my picture with these giant brussels sprouts!" while Ford thought "over my dead body am I eating those.")

We took the kids to the Children's Museum for Veterans' Day, which was a terrible idea, and not just because they're in a very committed anti-sharing phase (the rest of the state of New York had the same idea and there were more screaming children packed inside on a 20 degree day than should be legal).

Ford acted terrible at ballet, as usual.

And the kids were complete rock stars at the coldest tailgate of the season (although Ford doesn't appear to have been having the time of his life in this photo, even after having stolen Finley's hat and edged out this kid for the last dessert)

before getting warm and procuring more cupcakes at the Kimsey Center.

The rest of the long weekend was devoted to sword fighting, which has become a favorite pastime in our house (Ford screams "en garde!" with a hilarious and terrible accent before attacking people)

and putting up our Christmas tree. (Sara beat us, but we still watched "White Christmas" and felt like we gave it a pretty good try.) Which incidentally involved the trying on of All the Holiday Costumes in the bin and resulted in some of my favorite photos of the week.

We're not sure what the next couple weeks look like, but we're enjoying the heck out of Christmas lights and leftover tailgate food, and taking solace in the fact that at least, at the moment, nobody is throwing up. (Even while turning green with envy that most of the Walters Fam has been frolicking on the beaches of Hawaii without us. At least their pictures were fabulous...)