Christmas Chaos

There is only a few days remaining in January and I'm still wondering what happened to our Christmas holiday.  This year the kids only got out for a total of 12 days for a Christmas break and it felt like it was much shorter than that. Part of me wants to blame our flu-like bug that my daughter and I suffered through for almost two weeks during the early part of December.  It made life a little out of sorts for much longer than that and my Christmas decorating and shopping suffered a little because of it.  Plus, I had a killer cough that made childbirth feel like eating ice cream.  It's hard to shop when you are doubled over grabbing at your sternum when trying to decide which color blouse to buy for your mother. 

Even with the rush that came with Christmas we had a wonderful time. PB was off work almost the entire time that the kids were out of school and we love having him around the house.  He just makes it more fun for all of us. 

We kicked off our Christmas fun by making a Gingerbread house one night.  Our boy requested that we do this.  He reminded me that we didn't make one last year and that I told him that we would make one this year.  He has such a good memory!  It was a challenge to keep the children from arguing the whole time but they were able to get it completed without too much refereeing. 

 The boy gets a little frustrated by his sister's tendency to take over! 

It turned out pretty cute and what really matters is that they were happy with the results! 

One bonus to this Christmas was that I was able to cross an item off my bucket list.  We went on a Horse and Carriage Ride!  I have always wanted to do this and it certainly was wonderful.  The weather was just chilly enough and all the Christmas lights adorning Downtown Montgomery made it extra special.



The owner of the company was sweet to offer to take our picture for us.  And he didn't do too bad a job!  Way to go Mr. Horse and Carriage man!  :)  The boy pretended not to like the carriage ride but I knew better than that.  He had a good time but our girl LOVED it!  She has decided she wants to do this for her 13th birthday.  December birthdays are hard to plan for but I think this will be a perfect birthday evening for her and a few of her closest friends! 

Even PB thought it was a lot of fun and he's pretty tough to please this time of year.  I like to tease him and call him THE GRINCH because he's not always the jolliest person at Christmas.  ;) 

The carriage ride was about a 20 minute loop through the downtown streets and went straight up Dexter Avenue where we had this view of our State Capitol.  It was so pretty! 

After the carriage ride was over we walked over to a little Italian restaurant and had pizza for dinner.  The restaurant is in a newly refurbished area of downtown and is so pretty with all the trees lit with twinkling lights for Christmas. 

After our yummy pizza dinner we headed back out into the cold winter air and decided to go look at more Christmas lights. 

We ended up at the Capitol to admire its huge Christmas tree up close!  We got out and walked around and realized just how big that tree was.  It was a beautiful sight! 

After our pre-Christmas fun was over we had to get ready for our marathon of family Christmas get-togethers!  We switched things up this year by doing my Dad and Stepmom's house first.  We had a Christmas Eve breakfast and my-not-so-little Airman brother was able to be home for Christmas and it was totally complete when my little sister got off work just in time for us to be able to have everyone there.  PawPaw is an expert pancake maker and put his skills to work as soon as we got there.  We ate our yummy breakfast and opened gifts with them and had a fun time!

 Up early for Christmas Eve breakfast!  

      

    Paw Paw was getting ready to serve pancakes!

Chris was excited about getting Christmas lights!  (That's wasn't really his present but I was having a box shortage at my house this year!)  

 Our girl loves Belle and Belle obviously loves her too!

 Someone got a little emotional about one of her gifts!
  

 It was a ONE DIRECTION calendar!   Yes!

Having fun watching funny you tube videos!  Doesn't everyone celebrate this way?  :)  

We headed back home with just enough time for me to make my favorite Christmas dessert...red velvet cake!  I tried a new recipe this year for this yummy cake.  I found it on Pinterest and let me tell you it. is. delicious.  It is my new official red velvet cake recipe.  

 Doesn't it look delicious?  

I had to finish wrapping a few presents after I finished baking my masterpiece of a cake and was able to get all my wrapped gifts under the tree.  Whew!  It was good to be done with everything just in time to go to our next family gathering.  

Our "official" family Christmas photo!  

It was time to load the car with presents for all our family at PB's parents house.  This gathering is extra fun for the children because there are 6 cousins to play with that are all pretty close in age. It can get a little crazy  but everyone is always glad to see each other.  

 Mimi and Papa with all the grandchildren!

Wow...everyone is smiling at the same time!  Bonus Christmas photo!  

We always have lots of food and lots of presents at Mimi and Papa's house.  Everyone watches each other open every gift and it makes for a rather interesting but long afternoon/evening.  It's especially hard to wait when you are 9 years old and you have to be patient while watching every one else open their gifts.  

The boy was really glad when it was his turn to open up a gift and he received this...a new Lego set!  

He didn't waste any time in putting it together!  He went to a corner of the kitchen and got to work! 

After we opened up all the gifts and said our "Merry Christmases" to all our family we had to head back home to get ready for Santa Claus!  Our girl was a little sad to get her elf and reindeer ready to go back to the North Pole with Santa but she was so thoughtful to send a treat back with them.  

 Chocolate and nuts...Emerson and Chestnut's favorite foods!  

She even left Santa a note that he could keep the straw in his milk cup.  :)

Everyone got tucked into bed and quickly drifted off to sleep even with the anticipation of Christmas morning.  We actually slept in for a change.  It was almost 7:00 when the boy walked quietly into the kitchen to ask about waking up his sister so they could see what Santa had brought them!  

Sleepyheads!  

 Santa came!  

 More Legos! 

 A new curling iron!  

Our girl with her baby dog, Polly!  

As soon as they inspected their new things from Santa we got busy with opening our gifts to each other.  Every year since our girl was born, PB has received a new coffee mug with pictures of the children on it.  It has become a Christmas tradition for us.  

 The best gift PB has ever bought me (without me picking it out first)!  ;)

 Our girl didn't waste any time painting her nails with her new nail products!  Thank you Santa!  

PB had to explain to Polly that she didn't get a gift because of an incident with blow pops the week before.  She devoured 6 of them while I was out running errands one day and made a huge mess all over our family room.  I was not a happy camper that day!  So Polly got her Christmas present a little early this year.  :)  

We had to quickly get ready for our final Christmas gathering at my mom and stepdad's house.  We loaded up the remaining presents and headed back to Montgomery for more Christmas fun!  It is usually extra crazy at their house with aunts, uncles, cousins, and even dogs.  Polly got to go enjoy Christmas day with us all!  

This year we were blessed to have a new member of our family with us.  Brooks is my cousins little boy and he is the most precious.  With his big blue eyes and perfect round cheeks that are impossible not to want to kiss over and over...he's adorable!  

Sweet cousins all together! Our two kiddos plus Brooks, Emily, and Doodle

We ate an insane amount of delicious food and then opened more and more gifts!  Everyone buys everyone a gift and it gets crazy with wrapping paper flying around and ribbons being tossed all over the place.  We are very blessed with a family who loves us and spoils us so much!  

 Brooks like his new Penguin and wanted to "kiss" it!  

What a mouth!  She was so happy to get a new Kindle!  

 Somebody got new underwear!  

Grandmama opening her new calendar from us!

We had a nice Christmas full of fun, family, and lots of food!  I am already thinking ahead to how I'm going to try to be more prepared this next year so that I don't feel quite so rushed just in case another bug decides to invite itself into our home.  But for now we are settling back into the routine of our "normal for us" life.  For us that means school and homework and dance and cub scouts along with all the other things that make up our daily lives.  As much as I love Christmas and the fun it brings us, I am glad to be back to our regular every day schedules.  Are you back in the routine yet or are you experiencing a Christmas hangover?  

Christmas Tree Bokeh

I never knew that this word even existed until about two years ago and I saw it on a blog around Christmastime.  I create my own bokeh with my squinty eyes every year when I'm putting lights on the Christmas tree.  It helps to see where the holes are in my tree and shows me where I need to put some lights on it.  Does anybody else do that or am I just weird?  Hmmm. 

Anyway, I got a new lens this year for my birthday.  It's a 50mm prime lens with a 1.8 f/stop.  I love it and boy does it help create some bokeh!  I set up a little studio in my family room so I could try it out the other day and I am loving how my shots turned out.  The kids were at school so my subject had to be something else.  Our mini-weinie dog volunteered to help me out.  At first I was going to use one of my Nutcrackers but she insisted that I photograph her instead.  :)   She's so helpful.    

 

 

Look at that bokeh!  Not too much blur but just enough.  Let's go in a little closer.  

 

Love this one.  So sparkly and fuzzy and almost sort of magical.  The lights almost melt into one another.  Yeah, I guess the dog is kinda cute, too.  If you like dogs and all.   She was getting bored at this point and decided to lay down for a bit. 

I am sure I will take more pictures of the tree as Christmas day is approaching but I had fun playing with my camera and getting a couple of good bokeh shots.  Do you play pretend photographer at your house?  Any good Christmas tree bokeh tips you want to share with me? 

Christmas Tree times Five!

Our house gets loaded up on Christmas trees this time of year!  We have trees in the kitchen, the family room, the dining room, and this year a new tabletop tree went in the foyer on my antique vanity.  Plus, the kids have their own trees in their rooms.  Except a certain little boy decided that he was not a baby any more and didn't want Thomas the Tank engine ornaments on his tree.  Humf!  He thinks he's so big, now!  So I'm not going to count his naked fiber optic tree in my Christmas tree round up this year.  Oh well. 

Our family room is the only room that gets a real tree.  We load up the kids and head to Lowes to pick out our 6-7 foot Frazier Fir every year.  We always get one of these trees and I love the smell of a real Christmas tree in the house. 

 

 

I love how full this years tree is.  He looks pretty good with just the lights on.  But I loaded him up with all our favorite ornaments.  We are big Disney World fans and on every trip we each get a new Christmas ornament.  All the Disney ornaments go on this tree. 

 

 

 

My favorites are probably the very first ones that the kids got on their very first trip in 2004.  They were so little but we made such wonderful memories on that trip and these ornaments are very special to me! 

 

 

Of course, every ornament on this tree is special to me for one reason or another.  Here are some of my other special ornaments. 

 



 

This tree is what makes our home feel like Christmas to me!  This is also the tree where Santa always leaves his presents for the children.  We always have a family photo taken in front of this tree on Christmas Eve! 

 

Our dining room tree is a somewhat skinny tree and is the tree that everyone who drives by our home can see at night all lit up!  It's perfect for this room.   It's all decorated in vintage glass ornaments as I mentioned in this post the other day.  I love all the colors in this tree and in this room. 

 

I even try to match my gift wrapping to go with the theme of this tree and I love how it all compliments each other. 

 

 

 

Our little girl's tree is a brand new tree this year.  She had a little 1 foot pink Barbie tree for years but it felt way too small in her new room last year so we decided it was time to get a bigger tree.  We bought this pre-lit white 4 foot tree after Christmas last year at Wal-Mart and it really fits her room well.  She has had a lot of these ornaments since she was a baby. 

 

This Care Bear ornament was her favorite thing one year at Target.  She kept going over to the ornament aisle every time we would go to Target and she kept asking for it.  It really wasn't what I wanted to go on her tree at the time but I finally caved and got it for her.  Now I think back to that memory and could almost cry every time I picture her little 3 year old self picking it up and admiring it.  I'm so glad she has it!  Even though it's a little embarassing to her now I think she secretly still loves it, too! 

Our girl was born on December 11th so we had a ton of  "Baby's 1st Christmas" ornaments.  We still use a lot of them on our family tree but I let her put a few of them on her tree.  This one is extra cute!

Her tree is adorable and she loves it! I let her decorate it all by herself she did a wonderful job placing each ornament in the perfect spot.  Merry Christmas from our favorite girl! 



 

One last picture is the little tabletop tree that is in our foyer as you walk into our front door.  It is so sweet and I picked up the colors from the dining room to decorate it.  Nothing too fancy but a little touch of Christmas to greet you at our front entry way! 

 

 





I already gave a little peek of our kitchen Christmas tree here in the post I wrote about my new tree skirt.  All of those ornaments are handmade by the children and we've had some of them for several years.  It looks so cute in the kitchen and is such a sweet little tree! 

What do you think?  Too many trees or not enough?  My sweet PB thinks I'm crazy, probably, for putting up this many trees but he doesn't say a word.  He lets me have fun with all of it! 

I'm linking up with the fun party over at:



Merry Christmas, y'all!





Christmas Magic

I love decorating for Christmas!  Every year I add a few new pieces to my stash of Christmas stuff and it is so fun to pull it all out each November.   Last year was the first Christmas in this house and since I painted our dining room a beautiful peacock blue I decided to really glam up that room for Christmas.  It is not my traditional lime green and red color scheme that I use all over the rest of the house.  I used turquoise and gold and silver to dress it up.  I love how sparkly everything is and how beautiful it looks at night.  My favorite Nativity set goes in the center of my dining table and I created a sweet little vignette to go around it. 

In my glass hurricane containers I used vintage glass ornaments and a few snowflakes.  The ornaments were given to me from a sweet friend of mine.  They belonged to her grandmother and she didn't want them.  Lucky me that she's not into vintage decorations!  They are gorgeous with my blue walls and my turquoise metallic tray that I got last year at Target the day after Christmas. 

 

 

I love how Mary is holding her heart as she looks at her newborn baby, Jesus.  I can't imagine what was going through her mind that day but I can imagine just how much love she felt for Him.

 

    

I used a few other turquoise accent pieces down the center of my table.  I picked up th

is little glass tree last year at Target, too.  The gold reindeer is an old piece I've had and I have used him throughout the years with different colored ribbons adorning his neck.  He looks so pretty with his turquoise ribbon this year. 

 

 

 

I have had this gold wire angel candle holder forever.  It comes out every year and probably always will.  I love it!  Candles are always a part of my Christmas decorating and add a touch of magic to my dining table.  It's always a special treat when all the candles are lit. 

So that is what my Christmas decor looks like on my dining table this year.  It's especially beautiful with all the shiny gold and white candles lighting the whole vignette.  I love how it turned out and can't wait to start having magical candlelit dinners in here!  I'm linking up to Rhoda's vignette party.



My Custom Christmas Tree Skirt

Hey Y'all!  Is anybody else shocked that it's December already?  I cannot believe it.  Didn't the kids just start school a couple of weeks ago?  I am having a slow start to decorating this year because me and the kiddos have had the plague.  Or the funk. Or whatever you want to call it.  It's made me have a slow start to decorating for Christmas this year.  But I've finally got one tree finished and wanted to show how cute it looks with my new tree skirt. 

We had a Christmas Craft party at our church a few weeks ago hosted by our Women's Ministry and you could choose from 4 different crafts to make during the two hour event.  I chose to make a tree skirt because I've actually never had a real tree skirt.  I've used fabric in all of my 15 years of decorating my own tree.  It's always worked and I never wanted to spend the $40 to $50 on a tree skirt.  Heck, who am I kidding?  I have admired one in the Ballard catalog for so long I feel like it's mine but at $98.00?  It will just have to remain there on those shiny pages.   

Back to the story!  The lady who was helping oversee the tree skirt suggested that we buy 3 yards of a fabric of our choice.  I went to Hancock Fabrics and chose 3 different Christmas-y fabrics in my favorite Christmas colors:  red, lime green, and white.  I also decided to add a piece of trim to the bottom of my skirt so I bought 3 yards of wide ric-rac.  I had a coupon so ended up only spending $23.00 for the 3 yards of fabric and ric-rac. We were going to be cutting our fabric into 4 inch strips and hot gluing them to an old tree skirt.  (I had to go buy a cheap one at Dollar General.) 

  Pretty cute for $5.00 at the DG! 

All my supplies:  red, green, white strips of fabric, wide ric-rac, and lots of glue sticks!

 

I began working at the bottom of the old cheap tree skirt and ran a 4-5 inch line of hot glue across the bottom edge of the tree skirt.  Then I quickly took my green strip of fabric and placed it on the hot glue and bunched it up to make it look like it was gathered with a sewing machine stitch.  I held it in place until it was semi dry and then kept going around the bottom of the skirt.  Once I got all the way around the bottom of the skirt, I started a new row with my white fabric and did the same exact thing: ran a 4-5 inch line of hot glue and began bunching my white strip of fabric until it looked like it was gathered.  I placed each row of fabric about 3 inches above the row below it so that it slightly overlapped.  I worked my way up the tree skirt with each color of fabric until I had 2 rows of each color.  I forgot to take pics along the way but remembered to do so on my final row (thank goodness!)  My little fingers were beginning to get sore from all that hot glue bunching! 

 

 

 

 

Then it was time for me to work on my trim piece:  the wide ric-rac.  I started out by putting a thin line of hot glue on the backside of the entire top edge of ric rac and placed it on the trim.  After a few inches of doing this I realized I was going to be using a lot more ric rac than I had so I started placing a dot of glue at the top part of the ric rac and just placing it on my green fabric where it would touch the edge. 

 

 

 

Hindsight is definitely 20/20 on this project.  Once I was done I realized it would have been easier to put my trim piece on my green fabric either before I started with the whole project or maybe not gather (or bunch up) my fabric quite as much as I did.  Regardless of my hindsight I think that it turned out adorable and looks so sweet under my tree.  I love that it's my style and matches my Christmas decor perfectly in our kitchen. 

 





 

 

This is a little 4 foot tree that I put in our kitchen.  All of our handmade ornaments go on this tree and it is so special to me.  The kids pre-school craft ornaments go on this tree and some of them are so simple but are so precious!   It is one of my absolute favorite things that I decorate for Christmas each year. 

 

I'm sharing this over at http://www.homestoriesatoz.com/tutorials/tutorials-tips-link-party-88.html so you can link up a post of your own if you want!  Come check everything out!