Deck the Halls...

...well, the tree anyway.

I wanted to get the tree decorated early this year so that I would be able to take the girls' annual Christmas picture. I never get it done in time so I am rushing to get them printed and stuff. It didn't quite work out.

The kids were off of school for almost a week and a half. It wasn't quite as bad as I thought it would be. Christian helped me by taking one of the girls with him to work on a couple of the days for a few hours. They are always begging to go in with him. On one of the days we met up with them at the Botanic Gardens for a picnic and then took both the girls home. They even napped several of the days. When Christian was home, he worked to patch the huge gaping holes left from the plumbing fiasco when we moved in. It's pretty complicated and has taken some time. We hope to get it done by the end of the year.

We spent Thanksgiving with my family this year. Nothing really big. We had lunch because my sister had other engagements with her in-laws that evening. The girls had a lot of fun playing with their cousins though.

Anyway, on Sunday, we finally dragged out the fake tree and our old ornaments and got to work. I used to really enjoy decorating the tree but I remember that last year was a bit of a nightmare because the girls were so excited to help decorated that they nearly trampled all the ornaments into the ground trying to get their sticky little fingers on all of them. It went a bit better this year though. The girls are learning a bit of self control.

We have our work cut out for us but they are learning.

We also decided to decorate a bit on the outside of the house this year. We never did it at the old house because there are no outdoor outlets there. Well, we still don't exactly have outdoor outlets here either but it's on the list! But we managed to work something out. Unfortunately, our longest string of lights was a bit temperamental. It worked and once it was all hung up, it stopped working. We took it down to check it and it started working again. Needless to say, I chucked it into the garbage after messing with it for some time. The rest of the lights can not be attached end to end so I had to go out and get new lighting. So, right now, we only have one little strip of light over the garage. It looks super pathetic...especially since our direct neighbor is one of those people that goes crazy with the Christmas decorations every year. His mother happens to live directly across from us and he did their house too!