Lest you think my house is tidy (this one's for you, Martha) ...

. . . here is what my beautiful children did on Friday. Mr. Jones brought in all the boxes of Christmas decorations, and the kids were setting up the miniature village in the family room. I had been busy picking up and cleaning each room, and I decided to sit down and rest for 5 minutes. Then, what I call the "Wack-a-Mole Phenomenon" occurred: I'm housecleaning, and as I clean a room, my children (namely the VERY energetic youngest) zips to a different spot (usually one that I have already cleaned) and destroys it. In this case, there were so many packing peanuts in my family room, that it honestly took us hours to get it all out. It's not easy to pick those things up. You get a handful and try to dump them in a bag, but they stick to your hands. They find every little crevice of the room and hide there. They are too big to be vacuumed up. Corgis run through the house, disbursing them everywhere. I snapped off the photo of the peanuts to share with you, and then I read about the packing peanut incident at Elizabeth Hill Cottage and just about died with laughter.
Here are a couple pictures I took on Thanksgiving. I was playing with the camera to take better pictures with backlighting, but I really, really, really want to take a photography class, especially one like this one.

Now I need to get some ideas for the Christmas card picture.