Decorating for Christmas

One of the joys of Thanksgiving coming so early this year is that means we get to have Christmas decorations up that much longer!!! This combined with having Thanksgiving in town, meant that there were a few extra hands to help with putting lights up this year... after the football game was over, of course!

Here is Miss Jana, the day after Thanksgiving, helping Daddy put up Christmas lights.


"Here Daddy, I'll go up the ladder for you!"

"Okay, you're doing a good enough job. I think I'll go for another spin in my car."

We took a trip out to Uncle Mike's "Christmas Tree farm" for our favorite kind of tree - freshly cut, picked out by us, and well, free. It was late on a very crisp day, so we were hustling to find the trees we were cutting before it got too dark. We soon discovered that a toddler, darkness falling around us, uneven and muddy terrain, and two dogs running around were not ideal circumstances for Jana to be navigating on her own, so I became her favorite transportation.

Just call me the Mama Totem Pole!



Stopping mid-search for a family photo.

Even Gapa got into "mule" mode and Jana 'convinced' him to carry her around for a while. We all know how hard it is for her to 'convince' him to do anything like that! :-)

"Whatcha doin' Daddy?" (If only you could see the saw in his hand and the panicked looks on Gama and Gapa's faces as she is insisting upon being involved in this process!)

A little cuddle time by the heater - trying to get warm again.


Jana 'helped' put ornaments on the tree. Okay, who are we kidding! She did a wonderful job of playing with the ones we gave her to put on the tree and loved taking the others off.


"Oooooh! Yights!" (Lights to the rest of us.)

She has her favorite ornaments she wants to show you - the trolley, the dogs, Santa, bells, or "deers" (reindeers).
But, her favorite part of all is the "doot doot" under the tree. She loves it when someone will run it for her. We're having to keep a pretty close eye on her, though, because she likes it a little too much. Her newest thing is to put her toys on the cars, so she can watch them go around too.