Football is fun. So are books. And embroidery.

It was another slow week. Monday was the college football championship game and we invited our friends, the Childresses, over to watch with us. Camber and I ended up chatting the whole time while the boys watched the game. We all had fun though.

I read another book this week--Perfect Chemistry by Simone Elkeles. It as entertaining, but I wouldn't recommend it. It was rather badly done. Cliched and heavy handed.

I also finished outlining my next writing project, which is a huge step for me. Outlining is super hard, since plotting is not my strong point. I'm much better at characters. My friend Leah (one of the members of my writing-group-no-more) is a master outliner and she skyped with me yesterday for an hour helping get all the plot points ironed out. I'm so grateful for good friends who are willing to help like that. Steve helped this week, too. I had my characters figured out, but could not figure out anything with the plot. He helped me realize that the characters weren't really compatible and I needed to put them in two different stories. As part of that, he was impersonating characters. You know your husband loves you when he'll impersonate a 16-year-old black girl from the deep south in order to help you outline your novel. :D

Emilia didn't have school on Friday, so the girls had a blast playing together for most of the day. At 4pm we were supposed to go up to Nick and Wilda's to meet our new foster-cousins Flo and Sebastian. The Coombs' came up for a funeral, so we got to meet the little ones. They were super cute. Flo, who is 3, seemed to get along well with my girls. And Emilia and Mira always love playing with Haley, too.

While we were there, I worked on my embroidery. Steve needed some new handkerchiefs, so I hand-embroidered some new ones for him. I enjoy that kind of work. And I like how they turned out.

Today we get to go up to my parents' house for dinner. We'll be celebrating Haylee's birthday and we get the treat of seeing the Staleys who are in town for the week. Hopefully, tonight I will have some time to make and write down goals for the new year. I'm a big believer in writing down goals. I'm much more likely to accomplish them. But I haven't taken the time yet this year to do that and I hope to have that time tonight. That would be nice.