A Little Christmas Joy

Christmas is absolutely my favorite holiday! I LOVE it! It's such a special time of year. Thoughts are filled with family, friends, love and memories of the past. And Christmas is the holiday we do at my house. Shell gets Thanksgiving and I get Christmas.

We did a family portrait this year. It's actually the first time that Dave and I have both been in the picture with the kids. I'm really excited to get the pictures back. I'm hoping they'll be in any day now. The portrait technician was amazed at how quickly we did our pictures. We have three children - everything we do is expedited. It took us longer to get service from the picture tech to make our selections and pay than it did to actually take all the pictures. Which, as I'm sure you can imagine, was quite irritating to me. Levi was all over the place! There was about a million people in there waiting for their pictures and he was making friends with all of them. Sears had a Dora video going so Sienna was pretty content to watch the show. Poor Sierra. She tried sooo hard to keep up with Levi. She did a really good job. She's so helpful to me at times. She's truly a blessing!

After family photo time we went to see Santa. I felt horrible last year because we didn't even do Santa. We knew that Sienna wouldn't sit on his lap (she made that perfectly clear) so we didn't even bother. This year, Sienna was excited to go see Santa. She promised that she would sit on his lap and tell him what she wanted for Christmas and even let Mommy get a nice picture. Which she did! I was so proud of her. Sienna isn't too smiley in the picture but I still think it's an awesome picture!

Our Christmas tree has been up for a couple of weeks now. Sienna LOVES the tree. The first thing she does every morning is ask to 'turn on the tree'. ALL of the kids helped Mommy with the tree this year. We do the fake tree thing. I think it's a little disappointing to Dave. We tried a real tree a couple of times but it's such a pain in the butt! The needles are constantly falling off (choking hazard for small children and puppies), you have to keep crawling under the tree to water it (how many chubby girls do you know that like to crawl under things?), you worry all month about the tree catching on fire, and disposing of the tree after Christmas is always horrific. And I'm not even going to mention the torture you have to endure while attempting to snag this tree out of the wild!! Isn't it so much easier to just go down to the basement and drag out the box? I think so.

Anyway, all of the kids helped put up and decorate the tree this year. Sierra was a HUGE blessing with the tree this year. She went through the box and sorted all the branches as I started assembling. She read the directions and knew which branches were needed and when. She helped Sienna choose the right branches and put them in the right spot. Levi wanted to help with this part but I didn't think that was a good idea for obvious reasons (refer to my previous post which mentions Levi choosing weapons disguised as children's toys). Levi did get to help with the fluffing of the branches to fill the tree out. He seemed to enjoy this part even though the girls and I had to rescue several branches and put them back.


Decorating the tree was alot of fun with the kids. I took a very relaxed approach to the tree this year. I think it's the best tree we've ever had. It might have an empty spot here or there and there might be several red bulbs grouped together in one area and the bottom of the tree is a little naked but it was done with love and wonder by the three people who mean the most to me. Every time I look at this tree I see love. I catch myself just looking at the tree and smiling. All the Precious Moments ornaments are at the very top where Sierra ever so carefully put them. For each ornament she had a different question and wanted to know the story behind the special ornaments that are always at the top of the tree. It was nice to talk to Sierra about the times when she was my only princess. She seemed to really enjoy hearing about the way life used to be.

Sienna loves to put on the little drums and presents. You know the ornaments that come from the dollar general, $1 for 12 or something like that. I've had these things forever and now there's not as many as there once was. But Sienna was digging through every box looking for them and she would get so excited when she found one and come running to the tree to find just the right spot. And that's exactly what it was~ every single one that she found was special and needed a special spot. She would stand back and look at the tree and then say, "Yep, that's it". She was very careful with the glass bulbs too. She kept saying that she didn't want to break them.

Then there was Levi. We tried to let him help. Honest, we did. We tried to help his little hand get the ornament on the branch but he would just get too excited and start smacking the tree and making things fall off, much to the girls' disappointment. So we finally gave up on trying and he seemed much happier to sneak in and steal an ornament from time to time. But he's given the tree his own special touch too. He keeps adding things to the tree. So far I have found in the tree: disposable camera, 2 dog toys and a dump truck. How he's getting these things to actually just sit on the branches is beyond me.

It was a really nice time with the kids. It was a day that I'll cherish forever. I can't wait to remember that day with them next Christmas and so many more to come.