It's beginning to look a lot like, well...you know.

The tree is up. The lights are blazing. The holiday tunes are blaring. The Christmas tchotchkes are out on full display. The house is so festive and cheery. The eggnog latte is back at Starbucks. Oh, I just love this time of year. The kids are fascinated with the tree and really, all the decor for that matter. I constantly find them chasing each other around the house, chomping the teeth on the nutcrackers, which Wyatt has some kind of weird obsession with (another time).  I wasn't sure if Hadley would be able to keep her mits off the ornaments so I hung the fragile ones up higher on the tree. At first she moved a few around and even took some off and put them in her purse, but the novelty seems to have died down for now. The other morning I came downstairs to find the tree completely void of ornaments. First *Gasp* horror. Then, What has Hadley done now? And how in the world did she reach the top ones?? It turns out she hadn't actually moved anything. She had just spun the whole tree around so the very sparsely decorated backside that normally faces the window was facing the living room. I sighed and spun it back around.

Christmas is even more fun this year now that the kids are a little older. They're at the perfect age where they're old enough to understand, yet still, young enough to believe. I love that they're so impressed by the magic and I can't wait to experience the holiday through their eyes.

The kids decorated their first gingerbread house. I decided to squash my inner control freak, type A self along with my desire to have all baking projects/crafts be symmetrical and attractive and just let the kids go to town. After all, the house really is for them, right? I thought I'd have a harder time keeping them from eating the treats before they made it to the house, but after sitting on a store shelf for who knows how many years, these things were hard as a rock and not even slightly tasty. Wyatt tried one first and made an awful face and ran to the sink to spit it out. Hadley settled for licking the icing. They piled all the treats on top in no particular order. The finished product looked like someone had dumped a pile of sugary boulders on the roof. We decided to leave the misfit masterpiece on the counter for a few days so all could admire it's beauty.