As I mentioned the other day, we discovered that the bounce house blower was good for more than just keeping a bounce house inflated. After telling the relatives about the chaos that happened the other day with the painting and clock, Matt ended up pulling it out again to shoot things into the air:
Thankfully there was nothing left to knock off the walls, so the shower of colorful pom-poms was nothing but tons of fun. Grannie brought these with her and they were all over the living room for most of the visit. Today we managed to clean them up several times, but only so we could shoot them all over the place again. Ha - we're never going to be considered "adults" at this rate...
But I digress, I wanted to talk about how we were getting into the Christmas spirit up here! I have always been anti-fake tree for Christmas, but we ended up going that route last year. The biggest factor in buying the fake tree was because the last real tree had Matt so paranoid about it being pulled over by a rambunctious child (and how heavy a real tree is!). So Matt no longer has to worry about a tree falling on the kiddos and has the bonus side effect that we can put it up whenever we want without worrying about needles falling off!
I did insist we wait until after Thanksgiving, but since it *has* to come down before my birthday in January, now seemed like a good time to put it up! :)
Matt and I dug up the pile of boxes and crates of Christmas stuff from storage. You can see that we are now up to three trees - one for the living room and one each for the kiddos! They love having their own tree to decorate. You can also see the usual family dynamic: Matt fixing things, me taking photos and everyone else playing. Ha!
You can also see a new painting over the fireplace. That is a piece of art I did in High School and have been dutifully moving around since. I noticed it was starting to rip earlier this year and decided to frame it. Matt assures me that it will not stay above the mantle, but it made me happy to have it there temporarily. There's a bit of a running joke on the cow bone art - I love my art, Matt not so much. But he loves me! :)
Finally the decorating gets down to business! Thomas managed to get a few ornaments on the tree by himself this year - though it did require him asking "Should I put this here?" ten times before placing an ornament anywhere. Henry was just happy to hand ornaments to his Dada to put in their proper place.
Plus he was just fascinated by all the shiny and glittery ornaments. Overall, he was much more excited about the tree than he was last year! (Seriously, if you haven't seen the photo of Henry crying next to the Christmas tree last year, it's worth a look!)
After we finished up with the big tree, Thomas moved on to his tree. His tree is about 4' tall, so he is quite capable of reaching the full tree span. Considering that, I'm not sure how all of his ornaments are clustered in the same 1/4 of the tree. I added the stocking to try and balance them out, but otherwise I left them like he arranged them. It's his tree and he thinks it looks perfect!
But I think my favorite part of this photo is Grannie and Pawpaw in the background. Don't they look adorable? Pawpaw is straight-up passed out from all the fun of the day and Grannie is snuggled up happily watching her grandkids. It's a perfect capture of the day and a perfect start to ignite the Christmas spirit. :)