Hello, My Name is Emily: 'Tis the Season!

Whenever Thanksgiving falls at the very end of November, I feel cheated out of a week of Christmas. But maybe it's a good thing because when I'm crunched for time I tend to buckle down and get stuff done. Most of the time. From my last post you know we got our tree the day after Thanksgiving, but it stood undecorated in the corner of our living room for almost a week. Bean asked us every morning if it was the day we could put the ornaments and lights on the tree. She was ecstatic when we finally told her yes!

In some weird ways I was more nervous about Boy and the tree this year than I was the first year we had a tree and a cat. I don't remember being that nervous with Bean either :) But Boy has done really well to leave things alone when we ask him to, for the most part.

Boy was strictly fascinated with decorating the tree.

I think this is when my nervousness began!

We went to Festival of Trees a few days later than we normally do and it was much more crowded than we are used to, but we still seemed enjoyed ourselves. In fact, the kiddos didn't cause one problem the entire time we were there! Bean asked if I would take her picture in front of the Hello Kitty tree...and then another tree...and then another tree. Seriously, I have almost 100 pictures of Bean in front of a tree on my phone. Don't worry, I narrowed it down for the blog :)

No guesses as to why she wanted her picture taken with this tree. Little girl doesn't know yet that her Christmas morning is actually going to look a lot like this picture!

This one was my favorite tree. I Loved the whole retro-inspired setup! And the colors! Teal and red is now my new favorite color pairing for Christmas!

The next day we had our first real snow-day of the year. The snow and blowing wind made it nearly impossible to go anywhere so we just hunkered down for the day. S built a fire in our wood stove, I retreated to my craft cave, Boy slept, and S and Bean went outside for some sledding and snow-fort building. It's the last real storm we had but there is still a ton of snow leftover from it.

I love how this is the first year that Bean really remembers our Christmas traditions. She was very excited to go build gingerbread houses with Grandma J. again this year. She was a little put out at first that she was still doing a small one while Grandma and Mommy were doing bigger ones. I told her if she asked very nicely that Grandma might bake her a bigger one for next year, too. I wasn't sure at first if this was a good idea but Bean totally took over building her house all by herself.