The weekend after Thanksgiving we came home early from MS to put up the Christmas lights. For those of you who don't know, I'm married to Clark Griswold. When it's time to put up Christmas lights he's all business. He was so anxious to get them up that even while it was still raining on Saturday he was in the house getting lights ready. He had them laid out in the garage, ready to go. It still took him ALL DAY on Sunday to get them up. Inside is more my part. We have 3 trees (I know, excessive!) and the kids have mini trees in their bedrooms.
Last year I got this wild idea to sew my own Christmas tree skirt. I couldn't find one I liked that matched the whimsy of my kitchen tree so I bought fabric and had my mom bring me a very basic sewing maching she had. After several hours and way too many people look at the sewing machine it was determined that the machine just didn't work. This year I was determined so I brought the machine back out, spent a couple of hours playing with it, watched countless You Tube videos and read the manual front to back. I gave up on it, went to JoAnn's and bought another easy sew machine. Once I brought it out of the box I realized why I couldn't get the first one to work. It wasn't threaded properly. The new one was already set up and ready to go. Seriously the directions in the manual are awful! All it took was seeing it done and I knew how to do it. So now I have two sewing machines! I also have a tree skirt and 2 pillow cases that I made for the kids!!!!
One thing the kids love to do each year is paint ornaments. Hobby Lobby usually has them for 50 cents.
Something else Anna loves is decorating gingerbread houses. As you can see from this picture she usually eats as she goes. Her house is always pretty skimpy on the decor because she eats half of the candy while decorating.
This past weekend some of the mom's from Anna's 4 yr preschool class got the girls together for a reunion. At first some of the girls were really shy. It didn't take long before they were back to being silly with each other.
After the class reunion Anna had a Princess Tea Party birthday party then we headed to the Mannion's for our 2nd Annual Santa Visit. There were about 14 families and LOTS of chaos! I always feel like it's rushed but I guess the kids don't feel that way so it's no big deal. Both years we have "rented" Santa Jim. He's a really good Santa. He even dresses like Santa year round (shorts in the summer) and lives near us so we've seen him out and about.
Carrie and I got a good picture last year. Went for it again.
Future Rehearsal Dinner picture of these two!
We always have crafts and lots of food! This years crafts were ornament painting, advent calendars and marshmallow snowmen. Deidra also gave out cookie mix in mason jars as party favors. All in all it was a very fun evening.
Uncle Michael helped Alexis paint her ornament.
Sweet baby Brinkley's first Christmas.
Riley and Bentley enjoying their marshmallow snowmen.
I also wanted to thank everyone who donated to Zane Minter's Christmas fund. Zane's dad is my friend Charlie who I wrote about not long ago. The Minter's have spent every dime on Charlie's treatment so I wanted to try to take some of the burden off of Christmas buying for Zane. We had already decided we were going to donate to something this year for Santa Jim's visit. I asked if everyone was OK with donating to Zane and they all immediately agreed that we should. We collected over $300 to go toward Zane's Christmas!! I am so lucky to have such wonderful friends.
Next up for the Sorensen's... NYC!!! We can't wait to see the Martone's, the Christmas tree, go ice skating, freeze our tails off and just have a fun time!
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