"It's Beginning to Feel A Lot Like Christmas..."

It's one of our Christmas traditions to put up our Christmas tree and decorations the weekend following Thanksgiving. So Saturday afternoon, Mike pulled out all the decorations and put the tree together. Then on Sunday afternoon I turned on National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation and started putting up the lights. Well, I felt Clark Griswald's frustration with Christmas lights after I got half the tree done and then plugged in the third and final strand of lights only to find they were half burned out. When I tried to connect some newer lights to finish the job, I found they had a different size outlet. So we had to take down all the lights and start all over! I was so frustrated that I wasted all that time (hey I could have spent 2 hours sleeping ya know--I need it!) that Mike ended up putting the lights up himself on Sunday evening. Then on Monday, Tyler watched (and slept) while I finished putting up the ornaments and finishing touches. Granted it's never taken us 3 days from start to finish to put up the tree but we're happy that it's done! Here's a family picture in front of the tree.
Jeez it's hard to get a baby and a dog to look at the camera at the same time!


My old college roommate and good friend Ashley made a trip down to Bloomington Wednesday afternoon to meet Tyler and to visit for a while. It's always a treat to see Ashley and we had lots of fun catching up and playing with Tyler.

Ashley and Tyler

First Ashley, Tyler and I went out for lunch at Potbelly's. Then we came back and made Christmas cookies! Ashley was sweet enough to bring over all the ingredients to make (and decorate) yummy sugar cookies, peanut butter blossoms and these delicious 7-layer cookie bars. We had a blast being in the kitchen together again and the cookies all turned out pretty darn tasty! Thanks Ashley!

Yummy cookies!!

Tyler says "Gimme Gimme Gimme!"