Holiday Faves

This morning Leah and I went to the mall to do a little Christmas shopping. I finally found a cute dress for her to wear for Santa pictures! We are going later this week and I am anxious to see how she will react this year!

Here are a few things that I love about this time of year!

Yummm!

Trader Joe's has these super delicious teas!

I love the different screen savers with music on Comcast On Demand

I love our new gas fireplace (with another one of those fun screen savers on the screen!)

Gluhwein! If you haven't tried it, do so immediately! It is a German mulled wine. In Germany at Christmas markets they have little stands set up and you can go buy a mug of this hot wine and walk around with it. YUM

Leah's cute new hair tie. I love that her hair is long enough for a ponytail now!

Trimming our Tree

Today we put up our tree!  We have a tradition of listening to the Nutcracker and drinking hot chocolate while decorating.  The only thing that would have made today more festive is if it were snowing :-)

  

All done! Now we are relaxing by our tree with the fireplace on watching a movie. Ahhhhhhh so cozy!

Tree Farm

We have been going back and forth on getting a real tree or fake.  At our condo we had a fake 4ft tree that sat on top of a table. But now we have the space for a full sized tree!  Fake trees seem so much easier and it lasts for years and years, with no possible threat of bug infestation (eeek!), easy set up, no maintenance, etc. But getting a real tree is just more festive, GREAT smell, and a fun tradition.  All that said, we decided to get a real tree this year and hope it works out well!

We went to the same small farm five minutes from our house where we got our pumpkins for Halloween.  

There was the cutest little kitten playing around the trees and barn.

How about this one?

Follow Dada!

Yay we picked out a great tree! And HAD to get a fresh wreath too!! :)

This was really fun and I see why a lot of families have picking out a tree as a tradition!

I am realizing now that I don't have very many big ornaments, uh oh! Can't wait to get it set up and decorated tomorrow!

Getting in the Spirit

We still don't have all of our inside decorations put up, or have a tree. We can't decide between real or fake!!  But I have the boxes out and have been going through our ornaments and decorations.  I have a couple of ornaments that I really love that show the progression of our family!

2007 - our first Christmas married

2010 - our first Christmas with Leah

2011 - first Christmas in our new home!

I have so many sentimental ornaments but those are a few of my favorites!

We were singing jingle bells and Leah caught on and is singing it all the time, it is so cute!

She was jingling them singing "Jingle Bells, Jingle Bells"

Playing with her little light up snowglobe from Grammy

Dustin and I both had the Chipmunks Christmas album as kids so we were playing it for Leah. It turned into a dance party - :-)

That went on for the entire album!

LOVE this time of year! :-)

Christmas Projects

Today Allison invited us over to do some holiday art projects with them.  The girls painted frames, and we made different types of ornaments. 
This was Leah's first time painting! She got really into it. I may have to pass that info on to Santa :-)

Such a great morning!!  I love that Leah is now at the age to do fun projects!