Oh boy you guys. It’s that time of year again – the hap-happiest season of all! (If you didn’t sing that line in your head, try again).

It’s the season of it being so fucking cold it literally hurts your face to walk outside. The one where it takes 127 hours to dress the kids before they inevitably have to go potty and start all over again. And also the one where you run around spending hundreds of dollars on gifts for other people, but argue for weeks with your spouse over $23 dollars of Chinese takeout.

It’s the season for spending 3 hours in a muddy field looking for a perfectly cone-shaped tree that even though you measured five times is still four feet too tall for your living room and has needles made of porcupine quills. It’s the season of car trips and tantrums and kids that are living on candy canes and marshmallows and missed their naps 6 weeks in a row.

You guys, ISN’T THIS FUN?

This year, Dan and I decided, you know what, the holidays are already so joyful, let’s renovate the kitchen at the same time!

Ok fine, that’s not exactly what happened. It was more like, we’re already at each others throats, let’s see how far we can push each other before we get divorced.

Well maybe not those exact words, but thanks to some asshat that installed asbestos flooring, hacked apart a structural wall and did his own “electrical work” in our shit hole of a kitchen back in the 70s, our 6 week renovation scheduled to be complete the first week of December is now a trillion week renovation scheduled to plow right through Christmas and New Years, for a cool 5k more than we already didn’t have. And we’ve barely even started.

Joy to the world!

In order to escape the chaos and toxic dust (in case you’re wondering that is a decontamination shower inside our living room 🙄) we spent Thanksgiving week in Wellfleet MA, which is all the way at the end of the Cape where is takes one hundred hours to drive. Luckily it’s beautiful there, even when it’s -10 degrees with windchill.

The drive there was super relaxing, through a snow storm, Boston traffic and Lucy puking all over her car seat in the longest stretch of highway on earth with no gas stations. We even won a parent of the year award for stripping her naked in 10 degrees outside a Cumberland Farms and wiping her down with napkins from the bathroom.

Once we got there, though, it was lovely vacation. Lucy had a blast.

We really did have a good time, though…

…lots of food, lots and LOTS of alcohol, plenty of cousins to keep the kids busy while consuming said alcohol, and 4 days away from the current reality at our house, which is this.

Can you feel that holiday spirit? Dan: Only the kind that comes on the rocks.