three month break

three month break ... whoops!  what's happened in the interim, since september?  a lot!
on the matson front:
- he started eating solids
- he started crawling
- he started standing up
- he started taking steps (only while holding onto something, so far)
- he started seperation anxiety (yaay)
- he started jabbering a lot more and saying "dada" constantly (pretty sure he doesn't know what it means yet)
- he discovered his love for christmas lights
- he started taking showers with daddy instead of baths, which is basically as great as a water park when you're 8 months old

on the me and scott front:
- scott finished his first semester of his mba - hooray!  he just finished last night and doesn't have his final grades back yet, but i'll be pretty shocked if he didn't get straight a's.  so proud!
- scott went to men's retreat for church, which meant he was gone for a whole weekend.  which means that i survived a whole weekend with mats on my own!
- we got our first artificial christmas tree.  the weather was too bad to go cut a tree the weekend we had set aside to do so, and i decided i was tired of paying for an overpriced lot tree on the years we couldn't go to the forest, so we found a nice fake tree on craigslist.
- i finished my first "semester" at mops and women's bible study and am loving both so far.
- i made myself take a break from saver's - it's just too easy to find so many things to buy there!  for the time being, i can only go when i have something concrete i need to look for (personal favorite: picture frames).

and what's happening with us now?
- scott just finished his semester last night at about 10:30pm (online test), so we celebrate!  we're going to look at christmas lights with goo and her boyfriend, grant, tonight.  scott is very excited to have a poker night tomorrow.  christmas party at a friend from nourish's on saturday.  and $5 movie and a fancy dinner out (via a giftcard that scott's first boss left in his desk when he left the company, which a coworker found when cleaning out the desk, and then gave to scott because we live way closer to the restaurant than do she and her husband - very generous!) on sunday evening while mats hangs out with the macauleys.
- finishing up christmas shopping and wrapping so that i can get gifts shipped out asap.
- flying out to illinois to see my parents for christmas.
- re-doing our kitchen!  scott said that we can look at updating our kitchen as our christmas present to ourselves (which we've been wanting to do since we moved in), so just yesterday i started looking at all of that.  the cabinets themselves are still nice, but i want new cabinet doors.  i'm debating painting the cabinets vs leaving them wood, and looking at all kinds of counter options - mostly corian vs laminate at this point.  (granite's out because it's so non-renewable and it makes me sad when we're out hiking over granite boulders to think of people stripping those away from the ground.)

and more immediately:
- i need to paint a bunch of picture frames.  i'm bummed that i slacked on this last month when it was still nice out, because it's chilly enough outside now that i have to clear out my laundry room, lay out tarps, and spray paint inside rather than in my back yard.
- i finally bought myself a sander and need to start using it!  first on the list: refinishing our chipped up cheapo coffee and end tables.  next up: refinish a cool old dresser that i got on craigslist and put wheels on it - sideboard for the dining room that can easily be wheeled 10 feet over into the kitchen as a moveable island when needed!
- finish washing matson's diapers.
- go grocery shopping.  i resolved to not buy meat the month of december so that we can start using up some of the 1/4 cow of grass fed beef that we have in the basement freezer, and the pounds upon pounds of chicken breast that i've been stocking up on all fall since it's been so cheap - $1.67/lb some weeks!  i bought chicken wings last weekend per scott's request because we had a friend over to watch football, but other than that, so far so good!
- figure out why the little man is squeaking rather than sleeping.