It's beginning to look a lot like Christmas!

We were busy elves around here over the weekend. I spent most of Friday morning trying to get this place cleaned up a bit and organized so that I felt like I could actually get down to the task of decorating. The girls were quite anxious and spent the morning hovering and asking "is it time to decorate yet?" over and over. There was a bit of kid-style helping when they got to play with their matching yellow feather dusters but otherwise it was a lot of onlooking and impatience over this trivial matter of cleaning that mom insists is necessary (geesh).

Once the cleaning, vacuuming and dusting was complete it was time for snack so I got them some fortification and they ate up quickly and were ready to help haul the boxes out of the basement!

We spent about 45 minutes unpacking and finding homes for our various snowmen, elves, santas, kid-friendly nativity, angels and other assorted decorations - and this year the challenge was to put everything in a place high enough that it was out of reach of The Mobile Menance, but low enough so the girls would also be able to enjoy the decorations and actually be able to help me do the decorating. It now looks much more festive around here! Here's a shot of our stockings hanging on the hutch with care. This is the time of year I always wish we had a fireplace with a nice big mantel.



On Saturday morning, with Rick home to help, we got the little fake tree decorated and set on a card table so that it would be (mostly) inaccessible to The Mobile Menace. As you can see in one of the pictures below she is mostly certainly a hazard to the tree and we are just praying that the damage to ornaments is minimal this year and that she doesn't manage to pull the tree down on top of herself!

The girls had a lot of fun opening the boxes and finding the ornaments which, at this age, still seem new to them each year. As we hang the ornaments I tell them the stories that go with certain ones - like the year that R begged for the fragile porcelain Rudolph ornament and then dropped it accidently. It broke into too many pieces to try to fix and I couldn't find a replacement for it anywhere. She was crushed...but Santa came through and on Christmas morning and a brand new and perfect little Rudolph was hanging on the tree! This year we put those fragile ornaments back in the box for another year and only put up the ornaments that were more or less unbreakable - just in case we do have a tree-toppling event!

All the Christmas-themed books came up from the basement along with the decorations, the fake tree and the ornaments. This year R is reading them to herself and I often find her curled up on the couch with a stack of Christmas stories by her side. A is constantly asking me to read her "one more story" from the Christmas box. We have a lot of nice ones and I like to add to the assortment every year, but by Christmas I am more than ready for them to go back down to the basement again until the next year!

Yesterday was a busy day at church. We had service, followed by choir practice, followed by pageant practice. They were assigned their roles for the pageant - R will be a dog and A will be a piggy. The Christian Education director found some cute plush masks at the Dollar Store for the kids to wear and they have one line that they repeat a number of times during the play along with a bunch of other kids dressed as farm animals. So, that was our morning. We went home for lunch and had a few hours to hang out before we headed back to church for the Advent Workshop. Our church has this nice tradition where everyone brings sandwiches to share and we have a soup and sandwich supper followed by Christmas-themed craft making. I brought along pipe cleaners and red, white, and green beads and at our table the kids strung the beads on the pipe cleaners and bent them into wreathes and candy canes. At other tables they made ornaments from old Christmas cards, placemats (also from old cards), gift tags with stamps, stickers, and glitter, pompoms out of thick yarn, and placed potpourri in Christmas fabric and tied it up with a fancy ribbon. The girls had fun bouncing between tables creating all the different crafty items. I invited my MIL along to help me out in case I was being pulled in two different directions by the girls but this year they were both quite independent and found other adults they were familiar with from church to give them a hand. Regardless, it was still very nice to have Grandma along to share the evening with! :-) It was a long day and the girls were riled up and difficult about going to sleep --- 'tis the season, I guess. And when we are busy with all good stuff, how can I complain?