Tis the Season

The tree is up, the stockings are on the mantle, and the kids are nice and sugared up.  The holiday season is upon us!  

We got a tree and decorated it on the weekend after Thanksgiving.  The kids are really into it.  Henry had Strong Opinions on the color of the lights.  Ingrid only pulled the entire tree down on top of herself once.  Lesson learned.  

The kids got their Christmas PJs on the day we put up the tree.  We made real hot cocoa and let them stay up late watching Christmas movies.  This is the first holiday tradition for our little family that is our very own, and I love it.

We took the kids to visit Santa at our neighborhood hardware/garden/everything store.  Henry took one look at his fake beard and said, "That's not the real Santa."  Good grief, what are we going to do with this kid?  He's only four!  Anyway, he accepted the Home Alone explanation that this was merely one of Santa's helpers because Real Santa can't be everywhere at once.

This was our first Santa experience but the kids sidled right up next to him.  Henry requested (and described in great detail) slippers just like Daddy's.  Ingrid requested purple hairbows, which is awesome because she hasn't let me put bows in her hair for four months.  Fake Santa liked that they were very talkative and had extremely reasonable requests.

We made an 11th-hour decision to cancel our Midwest Christmas tour.  When I was 25 weeks pregnant it sounded plausible that we could spend 28 hours driving across the middle of nowhere in the dead of winter with two preschoolers and a dog in the back of the van.  Plus take a quick flight up to Minneapolis and back so we could be at Schrader family Christmas Eve -- the first one without Grandpa Gene.

Fast forward to almost 35 weeks and this plan sounds...um...not brilliant.  On advice of [medical] counsel, we canceled our travel plans.  So instead we're staying home and relishing a quiet holiday.  We'll miss the big festivities but are looking forward to having the kids wake up in their own house on Christmas morning for the first time.

427 Amazon boxes, 12 trips to Target, 5 trips to UPS, and a partridge in a pear tree later, the logistical part of Christmas is complete.  As of today, the kids are done with school for the rest of the year and we're in vacation mode.  We're going to spend the winter break doing some of our favorite activities from before school took over our lives, some of DC's great holiday activities, and making cookies.

Lots and lots of cookies.