But when you’re cleaning and rearranging rooms in your house, you really see it. Our dining room looks awesome. It’s only temporary, as we’ll be doing some more shuffling after Thanksgiving, but right now, I’m just enjoying it. We removed some furniture for now. And it looks good. Like, insanely good. If we got rid of half our furniture, it could stay this awesome. And I’m really tempted to get rid of a ton of stuff just so we can keep it this way.

I am so over being cluttered and crowded.

I still have to clean the kitchen and bathroom. That’s on tomorrow’s agenda. And I really hope I remember to check on the turkey and make sure it’s thawing quickly enough. I have a feeling we’re going to have to immerse it in water to thaw it the rest of the way. Even though it has been in the fridge since Saturday, it’s still super cold. Like cold enough the innards are probably still icicles.

Everything is starting to come along nicely. And yes, I’m pretty happy about that. How’s your holiday progress going?

Hoo boy, it’s going to be a crazy week. Our place is tiny, as I’ve mentioned numerous times. So we have to clear out the dining room and see if we can bring up the bigger dining table from downstairs. And I just realized that I don’t even have a tablecloth to cover the old, scratched surface of the table (it was my parents’ table when they got married, and it has two leaves to expand the table quite nicely).

And I need to clean. And vacuum. And make up a menu. And cook. And hubby may have to work Wednesday and even Thursday. We’re not sure yet.

I’m going to work ahead as much as I can. I’ll cook the sweet potatoes a day ahead and just reheat them. I could probably do the same with the mashed potatoes (but I love them fresh). I’ll be heating the dressing in the crock pot, so that’s not a huge deal. Tonight I have a chicken carcass in the crock pot to make broth, which I’ll use in the dressing and gravy.

Rather than make rolls, we’re just going to get some heat and serve. I need to do that tomorrow. And figure out where we’ll get enough chairs. And get some more milk. We have plenty of butter.

Whew. This is why I’ve never had Thanksgiving meal at my place. Did I mention I need to clean? Looks like the next several nights will be filled with rearranging, deep cleaning the bathroom and kitchen, and trying to see if any of our friends have some chairs we can borrow.

It’s going to be a long, crazy week. But it will be so nice to have the family together. We haven’t done that in a while.

I’ll try not to stress too much. No one expects it to be perfect. They’ve all been over so they know our house is crazy. And crowded. But I think we can do it. Hubby helps, so at least it doesn’t all fall on my head. He’ll be right in there with me.

How’s your week shaping up?

And really, I should keep an eye out for gifts whenever there’s a sale and put it away for special occasions. It’s a little harder when you have extremely limited space, but I think I can make it work.

My son is so young that I honestly don’t think it matters whether we get him anything. Maybe we’ll just wrap some boxes for him to open. He likes to play with boxes more than the items inside anyway.

We don’t really buy a lot of gifts for other family members. It’s mostly for the kids. So we’ll buy a few small items for the son, the daughter, and the nieces. But that’s about it. We don’t see the need to go overboard with tons of gifts. It’s more important for us to spend time with family and friends.

So our shopping won’t be huge, and maybe we’ll even get it done early. And on a budget if we can. One step at a time. What about you? Are you going big? Cutting back this year? Planning on getting it done early?