Adventures in La La Land

1. I only work two days a week, and I'm fanatical about checking my alarms before bed to make sure I'll get up in time. (I don't care if the kids are late to school, but I can't bear to be late to work.) So imagine my surprise when Lucy woke me up 40 minutes after my alarm was set to go off on Monday. There's a fun way to start the week! Thank goodness I have one responsible kid. The other two were sound asleep still. (And of course, Levi was up before 7 every day they had off of school this week - how does that always happen?!)  2. So I may be slightly obsessed with the bin store. I went two more times this week. I wasn't kidding when I said $1 day at the bin store is going to be my new Wednesday morning tradition. This time I only spent $14. There wasn't quite as much good stuff as last time. But then I went again on Saturday with Niki. We decided to do a mystery package game for Christmas Eve and mystery packages were buy one, get one free on Saturday. We

 1. Neither Nova nor my kids had school on Monday, so we did a cousins activity of packing shoeboxes for Operation Christmas Child. I used to do boxes with my kids every year, because I love the idea of them picking out presents for another kid in this season of "the gimmes." But it's gotten really expensive lately, and I'm not sure how much it teaches my kids when I'm the one paying for it all anyway. Haha. This year, my gracious sisters bought a whole bunch of random stuff and then we let all the kids fill boxes. And now that I know this is going to be a new yearly tradition, I'll start collecting stuff throughout the year, so I don't have to buy enough stuff for three boxes at once. The kids enjoyed filling the boxes, and I got an amazingly good picture of them all looking at the camera and not crying! Drawing pictures to put in the boxes. 2. Meal update: this week I made grilled ham and cheese sandwiches with broccoli, sloppy joes, and meatloaf. I was