Yesterday was one of a string of busy Days and Evenings

Well we finally got around to getting the upstairs tree up stairs and up.  It is well lighted and on the way to being well decorated.  The lighting was again a joint effort and we are still not quite the experts —   we did redo the top half of the tree after turning off the lights to check out our handy work.

Future years may (or may not) show great improvement and will continue to be adventures especially as the younger set join the lighting.  You will note the absence of Luke and John Paul from lighting photos.  We were not born yesterday.

In fact this view of my hair line indicates it has been a while indeed since I was born.  An additional side note is that we hope to get the boxes out of the front room and the rest of the decorations up sometime this weekend.  (We hope)

We had a stop by one of the big box stores.  The girls are experienced shoppers in big box stores.

 and it appears Lydia has ridden carts before — or at least indicated that she knew how to.

Thursday evening, as is our custom on first Thursdays, Patt and I serve dinner at a homeless shelter in Raleigh.  Julianna and Lydia joined us.  They were willing and diligent laborers, setting up chairs.

 Setting the table, despite the challenge of irregular and quite mismatched silverware.

The shelter is chronically short of forks and spoons, so they had to problem silver and figure out makeshift table ware from serving utensils.

 They helped our good friend and fellow long time volunteer Robin prepare the drinks

and set out some of the condiments pre dinner time.  Mike, Robin's husband, is in the kitchen window handing out a sauce to Lydia and Julianna for delivery to the tables pre meal.  They, like their mom and uncle before them, did extremely well, and stayed very late and ate at those same tables later in the evening with some of the guests.