Tis the Season

I love decorating the house for Christmas. It always seems to help me get into the spirit of the season. This year we took it one step further and decided to get the kids decked out in the spirit as well! OK, so it wasn't really my idea. I got some train ornaments for the boys to paint. Caleb did pretty well right as first, but then he decided he needed a bigger subject so he started painting his tummy. (I do dress my boys sometimes, I promise, but I've learned it's much more fun for Mommy if they strip down before they paint. They don't seem to mind either.) I guess I'll enjoy it for now--at least this "bodyart" comes off in the bath.
The boys love decorating the Christmas tree. Their favorite ornaments are the ones with their picture in them. They love to show everyone "Baby Daniel, or Baby Liam". Caleb's favorites are the red balls (which we switched this year from glass to plastic--I'm slow but eventually I learn my lesson) and the big bells. Unfortunately, he thinks all balls are to throw. But he's actually done quite well considering the well-lit floor to ceiling temptation.

Speaking of lights, does anyone else love a tree full of little lights....that is until they're all done putting them on and mostly done with the other decorations when suddenly the top 3/4ths of the tree goes dark?!!! (Kind of snuffs all the Christmas spirit right out of me!) Luckily, my boys are good "fixers". I heard Daniel (on the couch behind me) say a little prayer for the lights to work. Then he crawled underneath the tree and started wacking the base. (It makes sense--faith without works is dead! Right?) Oh the faith of our little ones. The lights flickered back on. They did go out again a few more times, but each time Daniel and Liam went to work fixing (beating) them and they worked again. I finally decided I should find the source of the outage and found the plugs causing all of the problems. I've been thinking lately that sometimes those of us with kids don't get a lot out of church, but perhaps the kids make up for the lost lesson time during the week if we would just pay attention.
The day we got back from Thanksgiving there was a lot of wind. My boys jumped out of the car to find a huge pile of leaves blown up agaist our fence on the driveway. (Our little tree in the front yard isn't big enough to provide leaves for jumping in.) Immediately my boys got out their brooms and made sure all of the leaves were safely placed inside our fence on the lawn. My neighbors who all have huge trees laughed as they cleaned up their yards while my boys covered ours in a pile big enough for all of them to jump in at the same time. What a fun time of year!Here is Daniel making "leaf angels". Why not? Without the snow it's the next best thing!

Liam took the other extreme and buried himself with my help in the leaves. Afterall, it's a little cool at the beach this season.