More than "Mom": Openhouse

Well, today is officially day 1 of our openhouse poinsettia show at the greenhouse. The show originally started 20 some years ago, by Uncle Dave, just so that other people could enjoy the beauty of thousands of colorful poinsettias in one place. It truly is a magnificent sight. Now, it has grown to over 20,000 poinsettias, several displays, food, drink and live entertainment! It's a real draw for the community as well, since we started including local businesses in our wreath display. But, I wish our customers could really appreciate just how much work goes into this event! Poor Joey was up until 4am and then headed off to work again just after 6 this morning. Normally, Joe and Uncle Dave work so hard and long in the time headed up to the show, that Aunt Beth jokingly has dubbed us, "the openhouse widows". This year, I was actually able to be included in so much of the preparations in the weeks before that I got to work with Joe a lot more than usual. But that being the case, Beth said that this year my kids had to be the "openhouse orphans" since they've been without their mama so much in the last couple weeks.
I've been realizing how difficult this has been for the girls and seeing the effects in their behaviour. Lily and Joelle especially have been minding it and have been uncharacteristically wild and mouthy. It totally broke me last night, when Mom was here to watch the girls so I could help finish up stuff, and she put them to bed for me. When I finally came home about 11:45pm, Mom told me that when Lily prayed before bed, she prayed that Mama could "babysit" them soon! I nearly cried!
I'm so glad that today I will be home with them, though I'll be working by answering phones and doing bookkeeping, at least we'll be together!
Anyhow, I wanted to post some pics of the main display - Candyland. I'm rather proud of this one, since I did all the work! hehehe. Beth came up with the idea to do Candyland and I was able to design and build the whole board!
There's a couple other displays that we worked hard on too - Ang was invaluable to me this last month! But I'll have to add those pics later, as I didn't take any yet! But I'll steal the ones of Candyland off Beth's site!

Lollipop Woods