super cold! and presents

It is very cold today! Very! (for NC)
I think it was about 26 this morning when I headed out. The high is supposed to be 38, it's now 34 at 3:30pm.
At our fiesta on Sat. (which was fabulous by the way) we collected things for the children's services division at WakeMed hospital. Their child life division serves the main pediatric floor, they have a Children's ER, and our new Apex WakeMed ER facility serves children. I talked to a girl who is one of their child life specialists and she gave me a list that all of their people have designated as highest needs right now. Anyway, we always collect things at our party for some sort of charity so we chose them this year. We don't want to just ask people for money to contribute because they like to shop for specific things! And I know they trust us, but how to they really know where the money is going? This way it's a concrete thing to support.
I had an appt. at 10am today to deliver the stuff to the pediatric floor. Well, WakeMed Raleigh is pretty far. Well, about 40 min. across town. And it was 26 degrees. I planned to take the girls with me because I thought it would be a good experience to see us donating to people in need and to see that they are very lucky to be happy and healthy and all that. We talked a lot about how some kids will have to be at the hospital on Christmas. I assured them that Santa will still come. We had to park in the parking deck and walk over to the main entrance with 2 huge bags and a box. I took my stroller so we could load it up. Well Mollie was freaking out because she was so cold and wanted me to hold her. She was flipping out. So I was holding a 35 lb toddler and pushing a loaded down stroller and keeping up with Sydney who was trying to help me with the stroller, but was really freakin' cold herself, haha. It all turned out okay, they go to play in the play room a little, the child life staff was very appreciative, especially for the Transformer and PS2 games. Then we ventured back into the cold with Mollie IN the stoller to go back to the car.
Next year, if it's below 40 degrees I'll just tell the girls about how nice it was, haha. Although now I think they had such a good time they might think it's fun to be in the hospital.

I think we're all ready for Christmas here. I have learned to get used to Phil's annual Christmas Eve freak out where he thinks we didn't get enough presents for people even though I keep him in the loop the whole time and we've been shopping together some this year. He thinks everyone might need a last minute electronic item of some sort. And he always gets the girls something just from him. He already got them a Wii game, but I'm afraid that since it wasn't on Christmas Eve he'll find something else too :)
Sydney's been helping me wrap and is quite good at it. I see a future seasonal job for her. Maybe next year. She helped wrap the angel tree gifts from our church and after that she was doing some on her own. They look pretty good! So she wrapped my neices' gifts also and a few more.
This year our family drew names for gifts since we now are all married and stuff. We all buy for the kids and Mom and Dad, but the sibling girls drew a girl name and the boys drew a boy name. It really made it a lot easier and a lot cheaper! And we stopped doing gifts with Phil's brother and his wife last year and just do it for my neices so that helps a lot also. Actually, now that I think of it, Phil did get his brother a gift anyway...but he really wanted him to have it. I'm going to have to have a talk with him about the reason we made these Christmas procedural arrangements I think;)

Last night I went to the grocery store and am going to try not to go back until after Christmas! We'll have Christmas dinner over here around lunch time that day. I should be ready!