Christmas Decorations

It has been a busy, busy week again! Tonight Brian took Austin and Julia to Awana, while I stayed home with Lauren. She is sick with a nasty cough and a slight runny nose. I gave her a bath and we read stories. Gave her cough medicine and put the vaporizer on in her room. Hopefully it will help for a few hours! Last night I woke up at about 4:30 because she was coughing so much and gave her more medicine. Poor girl. Sadly, I'm wondering if "sick days" or a "sick night" in this case, will be the only way I'll be able to update here this season! We just have a lot going on.

Tomorrow we need to go grocery shopping. My breakfast group is doing our annual cookie exchange next Monday, so I need to buy ingredients for those recipes. I have three I plan to make. We have to bring a total of 5 dozen cookies to share, to give each person 5 dozen. Julia's choir Christmas play was last Saturday. Brian's mom stayed with us Friday and Saturday nights. Friday night I went to a ladies Christmas event at church. Saturday I tried to figure out printing envelopes for our Christmas cards on this computer, with our new MS Word program (new since last year). Of course it is ever-so-slightly different than our old Word. I did figure it out, but then fed a sample through the printer which twisted it all funny, so I decided at that point just to do labels instead!! I also made brownies and frosted them for the reception after Julia's play that night. Of course she did a great job, and of course I have lots of pictures, but as seems to be the case this month, they are still on the camera. Maybe sometime in January I'll have to do our December in review! (Not too likely.....)

Anyway, here are some of our bigger Christmas "decorations". The Target tree: a 7-8 foot Noble Fir. The tree skirt is constantly getting rumpled as the cats wrestle on it and Pongo wrestles with it. He knocks off needles with his wrestling so I have to vacuum them almost daily. And our other tree, our 6-foot faux fir from Sears, purchased 4 years ago. It's in the dining room, with the hard floor, so 99% of its ornaments are unbreakable, in case (and highly likely) they get knocked off. I didn't even bother with a tree skirt this year for this one, because in the past Bailey would like to run and scoot on it, messing it all up. I am sure Pongo would love to play the same game! Also, most of the kids' handmade ornaments are on this tree.


Our fireplace: stockings hung by the chimney with care.... ;) I really should put names on them somehow. Oh well. From left to right: Austin's, Julia's, mine, Brian's and Lauren's.