Preparing For Christmas

As we have been preparing for the Christmas holiday I have been noticing how different it is. Some good, some interesting... For example, I loved decorating this year because I had a lot of help from my best helper, Zack. Hearing his oh's and ah's as I brought out another decoration out was so much fun. The problem was it took me about a week because we could only do it when Kiley was sleeping. She's not so much of a help! Point in case our tree...

We got our Christmas tree a few weeks ago. As you can see it needed to defrost a little while before we could decorate. So we had to entertain Zack in other ways. Below he is playing with his favorite ornament given to him last year by my Auntie Annie and Uncle Doug. It's a drummer that drums.

Then we examined the Angel for our tree...

...and Daddy gave Zack the honor of placing the Angel on the top of our tree, (Mom close your eyes).

Next came the lights which Kiley liked to look at.

We didn't get to decorating the tree with ornaments until the next day and even at that point it was only Zack and Kiley's that got hung that day. We let Zack hang the "unbreakable" ornaments...

...and wound up with a cluster of all of Zack's ornaments. :-)

Kiley and Daddy hung a few of hers too.

Once Darin and I finally started hanging our ornaments we let Zack help as well and noticed a pattern. Like ornaments got hung with like ornaments. :-)

Now that the tree has been decorated the trick has been to keep it decorated. It took about a week to stop Kiley from taking the ornaments off and just look at them. She does good most days but we still have a few not so good ones. Oh well! I do enjoy her choruses of "Puppy" for Coko's ornaments and "bubbles" for the bubble lights on the tree. All worth it in the end.