Monday Listicles: Holiday To Do List

I’m so upset that I missed last week’s Monday Listicles because I just didn’t plan well. I broke my streak of participating in this awesome link-up. This week, I’m back, but going off topic with a holiday to do list.

As mentioned above, I’m a terrible planner. But I thought that writing out my to do list for Monday Listicles might help me remember everything I need to do this week. And if you see something I forgot, feel free to tell me.

10 Items on My Holiday To Do List

1. I’ve finished all my holiday shopping (meaning I’ve ordered everything and am hoping it all arrives on time), but I need to get to the wrapping. I expect there will be piles and piles of packages from Amazon at my house today, so I need to start sorting through them and wrapping them.
2. Actually address and mail my Christmas cards. Which would be easier if they’d actually arrived. I’m slightly (or very) annoyed that I ordered them from Mixbook with an expected delivery of last Friday, and they’re still not here, nor does the tracking show when I should expect them.
3. Make teacher gifts and send them to school with the girls. Pinterest got to me this year and made me feel like I can make great food gifts for the girls’ teachers to go along with their gift cards. But I’m sure I’m overly ambitious in thinking I’ll make all four recipes I picked out. Tonight since I failed to start anything yesterday, and tomorrow’s the last day of school before the holidays.
4. Re-decorate the Christmas tree that fell down. We were going to do that this weekend. But we didn’t. Jenny was sick, so that was our excuse.
5. Take Brinky’s one year pictures! He turns one on Wednesday and my parents will be here to celebrate with us. Some time in there I need to remember to take pictures.
6. And I guess I should get him a cake. The poor third child won’t get a major birthday celebration, but we’ll shower him with lots of love.
7. I should decide what food I’ll be making for Christmas day, including something that will hopefully appeal to the vegan family members. I think I’ll be much more capable of hosting than I was last year fresh out of the hospital with a new baby.
8. Remember to move the Elf on the Shelf. I’m pretty sure he’s been in the same place for three days.
9. Make gingerbread houses with the girls. Or let them make them without me during the day. This is one of those traditions that I just don’t care about doing personally.
10. Take the girls and Brinky to the Festival of Lights (a local light display we go see every year).

And if you happen to be struggling with gift ideas for someone special, let me recommend these three items that you could still easily receive in time if you love Amazon like I do:

1. This mattress – It was on my wish list a couple weeks ago. And I’m lucky enough that my parents saw it and bought it for us. We slept on it for the first time on Saturday night. I thought it was amazingly comfortable, and a great deal, especially if you compare it to an actual Tempurpedic. Plus free shipping!
2. Roku player – I won this Roku a few weeks ago, and I have to say, we love it and use it every day. We were streaming Netflix through our Wii, but now we stream through the Roku (and let the girls use the Wii for Netflix in their room), and we also have the option of Amazon On Demand. I love Amazon On Demand. I used to have it through Tivo, but I switched from Tivo to DirecTV’s DVR, and lost the option of using Amazon On Demand. Now we have access to everything we bought before, plus all the streaming movies and TV shows available with Amazon Prime, and the option of renting for reasonable prices. It’s not quite as cheap as Redbox for renting (unless there’s a deal), but Redbox always ends up costing me more than one night’s rental since I can’t ever remember to return movies on time. There are other channels and features available that we haven’t even tried yet, but I know we will get a lot of use out of the Roku. And I can’t believe how tiny it is!
3. Amazon Kindle Fire – So I won this, too (I had a lucky week, okay?). And I do love it, but…if I had to choose between the Kindle Fire and my regular Kindle, if I could only keep one of them in my life, I would still choose my regular Kindle. I prefer the regular Kindle with its e-ink for reading, and it turns out that I prefer a laptop for web browsing. That being said, I do love the Kindle Fire for what it is. We’ve all enjoyed the games on it (I can play Words with Friends now!). I read a magazine on it for the first time last week, and it’s much better for magazine reading than the regular Kindle. I like taking it in the kitchen with me to follow along a recipe. And I like playing Pandora Radio on it. I think it is all Amazon claimed it would be, and that’s enough for me. But if you don’t have a Kindle at all and love to read, get one!

Linking up with Stasha for this rambling holiday Monday Listicles post:

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