Life As We Know It: Tis The Season to be Merry!

The Saturday after Thanksgiving we went as a family to get our Christmas tree from the Farmer's Market. The boys think it's great because they get a candy cane and we think it's just quick and easy. It didn't take long to pick what we thought would be the perfect one!

Our plan was to decorate the tree together but Hudson had too much of a magnetic pull to the giant leaf piles on our street so it was more of a tag team effort! The boys wanted colored lights this year for the tree so we bought all new strands and Jamey worked away doing by far the worst job in my opinion!

My parents and Brian and Sarah came over to watch the last Carolina football game so we all chipped in and decorated quickly at halftime. The boys are very good at decorating the front of the tree and hanging several heavy ornaments together on one puny branch!

Once again, Cooper has been precious and loved every bit of decorating for Christmas. He has told me several times, "Mommy, I just love this time of the year!"

Hudson was pretty cute coming down from his nap to check out the tree for the first time.

Once we finished decorating, we went back to game watching and my dad happened to notice that the lights on the tree were out! I went over to troubleshoot and realized the bottom strand wasn't working so I just by-passed that one and went to the second and all was well. We left the tree on while we went to dinner and came home to a dark tree once again! It was late so we decided to work on it in the morning thankfully! The next morning after church Jamey and I took off all the lower ornaments, took off the bottom strands completely and tried two new strands. Once again it worked for a little while, just long enough for us to get the garland and ALL of the ornaments we had taken off back on and it cut off again! We seriously felt like someone was out to get us and ruin our Christmas fun! Jamey realized later that night we probably just had too many strands all plugged together so it was blowing the fuse in the bottom strands. I can now happily report our tree is and has been working since then!

This past Sunday we took the boys to ride the Santa Train at a local train station. We had never done this before but were eager to try out something a little different. We knew we were asking for trouble taking Hudson on a 2:45 train ride without a nap and having already had a full day but we pushed our luck! They had several train cars decorated that you could check out and a cute model train area that Hudson really liked.

The boys loved Frosty and Hudson actually did too once he warmed up to him. Love the decorated porta potties in the background!

Time for our train ride! Everyone was all smiles as we boarded the train and were off for an hour long ride. Santa comes through each car and sits and talks with the kids so they really loved that!