It's Beginning to Look a Lot Like Christmas!

We had a great Thanksgiving - ate some turkey, visited with family, all that good stuff . . . but it all just leads up to the really good stuff - Christmas!  I love Christmas. 

We took the kids to visit Santa at the mall before Thanksgiving.  I did not want to wait in a long line with a bunch of other kids.  I also didn't want all those snotty kids sitting on Santa's lap right before my kids did.  How many times does Santa wash that Santa suit anyway?  I know that sounds terrible, but we still have to be very careful about protecting the twins from colds and viruses (especially RSV) this winter.  This was their first year to visit Santa since they were in complete isolation last year.  Cade just looked confused and Camdyn was on the brink of a meltdown.  They snapped a quick picture just before Camdyn had a meltdown.  She had no idea why I would set her on this crazy man's lap.  I quickly picked her up and all was good again.  In the picture below, the kids are checking out the giant tree in the mall.

                                

 
My sister and I are those crazy Black Friday shopping people.  We make it a marathon of shopping.  We started at 8 PM and continued shopping all through the night and into the next morning.  We finally wrapped it up at 10 AM.  It was a total of 14 hours of shopping!  We do all of our Christmas shopping and save hundreds!  Yes, my sister had these fun shirts made for us a couple of years ago.  The back says, "Step aside and no one gets hurt" jokingly, of course.  We might be crazy shoppers but we don't start any fist fights or carry pepper spray. 

We put up our Christmas tree this evening.  I'm not sure how long it will last with decorations actually on it with two destructive one year olds in the house, but we have to have a Christmas tree.  Here the babies are "helping" decorate.  I would give them an ornament and tell them to hang it on the tree.  They would take the ornament over to the tree and either lay it (Camdyn) or throw it  (Cade) in some of the branches. 

Camdyn carefully laying her ornament on the branches.

Here's Cade after he threw his ornament into the tree.

Cade's "I didn't do it" look after pulling several ornaments off the tree!

The stockings were hung . . . (5 stockings still looks like a lot to me)!

My mom gave Camdyn and Cade these adorable "Baby's First Christmas" ornaments last year.  I just love how cute they look together all "twinny".

Brenna's section of the tree.  She decided to hang all of her princess/Barbie ornaments very close together because "they are all friends".

Brenna loves playing with all of the ornaments on the tree.  We have a lot of ornaments that play music or have moving parts.  She was so excited about decorating the tree and playing with all of the decorations again this year.  She told me we could not eat dinner until all the decorating was done.

In our old house, our Christmas tree looked huge.  In our new house which has very high ceilings, our tree looks a little like a Charlie Brown Christmas tree.  I plan on buying a new taller tree after Christmas.  As you can probably figure after reading about my crazy Black Friday shopping, I have to wait for a sale.  I rarely buy anything for full price.

The shopping is done, the Santa picture is taken, the presents are wrapped, the stockings are hung, and the tree is up.  Yes, we are ready for Christmas!