Christmas Preparations

The girls were excited to open their new advent calendars this week and fish out the first piece of chocolate. Of course Caroline is ready to rip all of the windows open each night, but Katie has clued in to how it works. Although, Saturday night she proclaimed to me "Oh damn it! I forgot to do my advent calendar tonight." Thankfully I was able to correct her language with a straight face, but at church on Sunday I did get the giggles as I looked at the advent wreath and thought of Katie's remark . . . something she says she heard from a little boy at preschool. The best part about it was that she was nicely helping me put out decorations at the time and said it in a very kind voice.

Saturday morning we went to get our Christmas tree. It was very cold, so we had to get really bundled up. After much perusing of the lot, we found one we liked. At first we were eying a tall skinny one, but then I found a fuller one and yelled to Jamie "This one is tall and fat." Jamie replied "Oh, just how I like 'em." He was lucky that his comment was funny enough to get him out of trouble!





Caroline liked helping brush the snow off the tree, so we put her to work.
We got the tree home without incident and then got Katie and Jamie ready for their Indian Princesses event. They were wrapping gifts for Toys for Tots, decorating cookies for the homeles shelter and swimming at the Y. With the amount of sprinkles used, Jamie warned that there might be some homeless people all hopped up on sugar in the very near future.



While Jamie and Katie were gone, Caroline and I enjoyed our time together. She was very excited that she went poop in the potty . . . so excited that she came out in the hallway to tell me and she also went poop on the hallway floor. It's always an interesting clean-up event when you are trying to keep little people and dogs from moving in on the problem area while trying to grab the cleaning supplies. I think I yelled the word "freeze" a lot.

After Jamie and Katie returned home from their event, we brought the tree inside and began decorating for Christmas. Caroline was excited about our new stockings and decided to put them on her feet. Katie followed suit and they were quite pleased with themselves.


Then we had a winter dinner of homemade chicken noodle soup and peppermint ice cream and got back to our decorating. Caroline had her bath while Katie and I raced to get the lights up so that she could do the star on top of the tree. This took some positioning with Katie- she negotiated for tree lighting rights and the opportunity to put the star on our second tree.




Caroline was very pleased with herself!
Katie and I got into our Christmas jammies and spent the rest of the evening getting our special ornaments up. We finished up with our fillers today.

This morning we went to church and Katie enjoyed the St. Nick's celebration which included getting treats in her boot. When we got home we bundled up to take the girls outside so that we could spend some time getting our exterior decorations up. Jamie got the girls shoveling before he took up the lighting project, so we really accomplished a lot! And, as usual, we were out hanging lights on one of the chilliest days of the year (as our neighbors were smart enough to do it when it was warmer over Thanksgiving!)


We're continuing to get our decorations out as I balance trying to involve both girls with preserving our holiday decorations for future years. Katie and I have enjoyed putting her special snowman collection in our downstairs bathrooms for the last few years, but now we have to monitor Miss "bull in a china shop" at all times! I have overheard Katie giving Caroline a few lectures today about things being fragile, so at least I have an extra police force on my side!

Here's our finished tree and you can see that Elfie decided to make that his landing place last night.


I tried to take a picture of both girls in front of the tree and I ended up with a photo that pretty much sums up how things go around here: 1) Katie is doing her new model pose 2) Caroline is mad and hitting the couch while pouting and saying "No!" 3) Lily is right in the middle of the way and 4) Jamie is sitting on the couch watching football. I suppose you could also add 5) Mom is trying to take a photo!

Here is the tree we decorated in Katie's room. She crammed on every ornamenet that she has (which is quite a few) and the tree is really quite a site!