Brr!!!

 I love Christmas! Unlike many, I am insistent on waiting until after Thanksgiving to decorate or listen to Christmas music. I don't like to rob Thanksgiving of it's uniqueness and recognition. But I do love it when it comes time to bring out all the stuff and go get the tree (yeah, we're suckers and still get a real tree every year, although this is the first year we have debated on which to do)

 So here are just a couple pic's of how I "decorate" - I really wanted my nativity to be on my shelf, but after putting it up there, the shelf was leaning downwards, so I moved it to the piano, which I actually like more because you can see it better and it is the first thing you see when you walk in to my house. And don't worry, Mark has an awesome stocking just like the other kids waiting for him at Grandma's house.

 A pic of my YW at our Christmas kick off activity where I showed them some cake decorating stuff for cupcakes that we ate (of course!) and also delivered to those who weren't at the activity and to some of the leaders in the ward who do alot (like the bishop, YW president, Elder's Quorum president, etc)

 This a pic during the construction of a storage shelf in our garage Robert built himself. Don't worry, that 2X4 is just there for temporary support. It now has three chains going up into the ceiling for permanent support. We liked this concept so much when we saw it at my sister's house and Robert found it to be so simple and relatively inexpensive, so he built a second one on the other side of the garage. We are still debating whether we really need a third over the freezers on the back wall, but this simply fabulous for now. Very excited to have so much more storage so the garage won't be so cluttered!

 A horrible pic of the parade Sam was in last week. Our little town has a light parade every December and then what they call Midnight Madness after where most of the businesses are open until midnight and have sales and specials going. Kinda like our own Black Friday. Well this year they decided to do a float for the kids in the Spanish language immersion program. Sam had a blast riding on the float and throwing candy! He was so caught up in it that he didn't even see us even though both Robert and I were screaming his name at him :)

 A picture of our gorgeous tree this year. This thing was such a pain to decorate. I don't know why, but every year I forget to plug in and test the lights before I put them on the tree. Of course the top two strands didn't work. I get them off the tree and start going through them to try and find the broken bulb and Sam does something to make the other half of the string not work. Robert tried and couldn't fix them, so we were going to just get a new strand of lights. But everything kept happening preventing us from getting to the store to get more lights. During all of this Sam is bugging me every day with "Can we decorate the tree yet?" I finally just decided to take off the blue lights and only do white this year so we could just get the dang thing done.

 The traditional decorating sugar cookies with our favorite peeps! The reason why I say Brrr! for the post title is because we have been having temps in the single digits for the past two weeks. Not fun to walk Sam down and wait for the bus for 20 mins when it is -2 outside! And last week we woke up to no power. We went over to the Potter's house which was slightly warmer than ours due to their gas fireplace and hung out until after lunchtime when the power finally came back. It is supposed to start to warm up the end of this week coming back up into the 30's, which will be nice. But today is a great day because even though it is still quite cold, there are huge snowflakes gently falling outside. Makes it all worth it!

 Our cute Amy showing off the new skirt she got from our friends. I have been so grateful to have found a person who has 2 very girly girls that are just older than Amy to get hand-me-downs from! Just about all of our Christmas shopping is done and a few more projects to finish up before we leave town for the warm country next Saturday. Tonight Sam gets to go to the school board meeting to sing a song in Spanish so they can see how the kids are doing. Tomorrow night Robert and I get to go out for his work's Christmas dinner at Johnny Carino's (I know, I'm in heaven!). Then Saturday is our ward's Christmas breakfast. Let the holiday madness commence!!