It's Christmas Time in New Orleans...oh, er, I mean here

Before I get into the Christmas decorating post, take a look at this ultra cool picture of Rhianwen flying after Aunt Clara's wedding.

We went to Pop N Son's Christmas Tree farm where they had a huge air-filled snowman (since a real one is out of the question down here in these parts), and lots of cut yer own trees. We got something called a Blue Ice Cypress. It's so pretty!

This is the tree for us! Well, at least mommy thinks so. Alden looks like he's thinking, "Why are we cutting down a tree ? This is not normal. I don't remember this happening yesterday...no, it's definitely not normal."

Rhianwen had a great time weaving in and out the maze of trees, calling for us, and peeking around trees to spot us further down the row. She helped daddy drag ours back to pay for it.




For some reason mommy wanted a little tree for Rhianwen's room, and Target had a treasure trove of little cheap ones. We let Rhianwen pick out the lights, and funnily, she wanted only red ones. I thought at first it might turn out looking a bit like the Christmas tree from...well, the devil's home, with all those red lights, but it's actually quite nice. Wally topped it with the Moravian star that we got from Old Salem last year.

Another new thing we did this year was to switch to big lights for the main tree. It looks so homey and it was way faster to do! This picture doesn't showcase the lights very well, but it's fun to see all the ornaments. When one of my friends asked Rhianwen which was her favorite ornament, Rhi pointed to one of many red shiny balls. I don't think she understands the concept of "favorite" yet. Rhi looooooved decorating. It was like one surprise after another as she unwrapped each ornament from it's paper towel casing. Really, that's all she wanted to do. She handed all of them to me to put on the tree.

Our star is too heavy this year for the tree. I'll have to do something else soon.

We unpacked all of the Christmas books (we get one new one each year). And of course Rhianwen loved that too. She's memorized most of them by now and will sit down and read them in her sing-songy voice. It's so cute. We brought her to Barnes N Noble to pick out this year's book, and she FINALLY decided on Corduroy's Christmas that has flaps on each page that you can lift. Part of the proceeds of that book go to helping kids with cancer deal psychologically with it all. No wonder why it was so expensive ;0) Alden likes it too, but mostly for grabbing and mouthing. Rhianwen does not like this activity so much. We also got a Potty book that Rhianwen loves, but she seems to be stuck on the part that says, "Uh-oh, I peed in my pants, but Mommy says 'That's ok!'". That's the part that she reads when she is reading it on her own.

I tried to get Rhianwen to decorate pine-cones for her dolls to have some Christmas trees for their dollhouse. She had a blast decorating but decided the dolls just didn't want a tree. So we ended up using them somewhere else.

"Sprinkles!" is what she called them I guess b/c we've been reading If You Give a Cat a Cupcake, and that book starts and ends with sprinkles.

We broke down and bought Alden a Jump N Go off of Craigslist for 1/2 price. I couldn't wait for Christmas, so we just gave it to him early. I'm sure he won't mind in the slightest when he understands later. He has been so WILD lately that this was just the thing for him. He will jump non-stop and giggle. The other nice thing about it is, that you can move it from doorway to doorway easily for change of scenery, but when he's done you can take it down and tuck it away somewhere so it doesn't take up extra floor space. Other things Alden's enjoying are inch-worming (just a tad) to get to things, wrestling with stuffed animals, and carrying on heart to heart conversations with anyone who will listen.

Thrilled. Rhianwen also loves this toy and would likely swing Alden through the ceiling if we'd let her. She dances like crazy to one particular song on it which also is very exciting to Alden. (I'd do a movie, but Wally killed our computer by trying to upload an XP update. Don't you love Microsoft (sorry Christopher...but since you are MS man, when you come, you'll magically fix everything...right?)? And for some reason when we reloaded XP, it isn't recognizing our wireless router, so we have to use Linux instead which doesn't run Windows Media Player. I am not willing to figure out a whole new program right now. Bed is more important.)