Getting ready for Christmas

Santa told Hailey even though it was naughty to draw on the front door with crayons she could still get presents!

This year Steve and I had all of our Christmas shopping done by the end of November. I like having it done early and think we will do that from now on. Even better than that I wrapped a few gifts that I wanted to wrap and called it quits. I got my visiting teachers to come over and wrap everything else, and a few gifts I picked up from my mom's house.

We told Hailey if she didn't go to bed she would have to sleep in the dryer with the local mice.

Last year we got out all of our Christmas decorations. I left all our decorations and our tree up for the entire month of January. Why? I was dreading how much time and energy it was going to take to put everything up. This year we only got a few decorations out. In general the older I get the more I begin to believe less is better.

Every morning Steve hides the Christmas elf and Hailey looks for it. After she finds it she usually wants to put it in one of the previous hiding spots. The favorite spot so far has been been inside the grandfather clock.

We also got her a chocolate advent calendar from my favorite store Trader Joe's. Hailey is obsessed with this, and I like for her to wait for Steve to get home to open up her treat. That is a very hard thing for her to wait for. Sometimes we don't wait for Steve because he has been working a lot of 12 hours days and doesn't get home until 9:30 or 10:00 p.m.

She thinks chocolates magically reappear every time she opens up a flap. She opened this same flap several times.... she is still waiting for it to come. She must have forgot she already ate it.

Her vocabulary has improved and she has learned lots of new words. Not all of them are nice, she recently told me, "Go away!" At night we like to walk around and look at Christmas lights which she seems quite impressed by.

The apple in the middle is from my CSA box. The two apples on the side are from the tree in my front yard. I think we have gotten close to at least 50 apples off our tree this year. It sure beats buying apples at the store. Hailey and I like to make cinnamon apple chips out of these on our dehydrator and they are delicious!