It's beginning to look a lot like Christmas!!

I'm a bit behind on my blogging, but wanted to post a few pictures of us decorating for Christmas! We put up our tree the weekend before Thanksgiving since we knew we'd be out of town for the holiday and we were celebrating Christmas at Thanksgiving with Gary's family. Alex was SO excited. We made the mistake of telling him that morning that we were putting up the Christmas tree (even though mommy insisted on cleaning the ENTIRE apartment before we could start... I wanted everything to be clean before we got out the decorations) Alex had a hard time waiting, he probably asked 50 times if we could start yet.


Spreading the branches


Nathan enjoyed decorating too! He's fascinated with the lights, shiny ornaments, and prickly branches :)

Christmas decorating is such a sentimental activity for me - it has been since I was a kid growing up. The decorations all have special meaning and bring back so many memories. Here we are talking about one of the Santa pictures. Alex insisted that ALL of the pictures of him as a baby were Nathan - such a hard concept for a 2 year old to understand that HE was a baby once too :)

Pulling out more ornaments!

Alex checking out his baby ornaments! He loved that these were HIS. One is the ornament we got when we were expecting (he was about a month from being born!) and the second was for his first Christmas. I am so not into the whole "pretty ornaments that you can't touch" thing... I LOVE having special ornaments on our tree. So our tree is filled with kids' crafts, pictures, and other sentimental things- and I think it's so much more beautiful than the "perfectly decorated" tree :) Ever since we put up the tree, Alex has made sure that the lights stay on all the time and he loves checking out the decorations... we'll see if our manger scene peices stay intact this year ;)

We're working hard to maintain a balance now that Alex is getting a little older and understanding more and more. We've been talking a lot about Christmas being Jesus' birthday and celebrating with gifts to show our love to one another and remember the special gift God gave us. He seems to KIND OF get it... but is still very excited for presents and Santa :) I'm so excited about celebrating Christmas with our two kiddos this year!! :D