Christmas Countdown

It's that time of year...where every free minute is spent Christmas shopping, wrapping presents, organizing lists, making food, working on Christmas cards, and planning Carter's birthday party - all while working and making sure everyone in the house is clean, fed and dressed.  :)  December has been good to us so far and we haven't been TOO busy.  Here's the recap...

At the end of Thanksgiving weekend, we put up the Christmas tree and decorated the house for the holidays.  We thought the kids were going to love the whole decorating thing, but really they could have cared less.  Carter sat by the tree playing with his new Christmas GeoTrax train and Brynn just pulled ornaments out of the box.  That night Brynn took 14 steps though, which was so exciting!  She is starting to walk a little more, but really still prefers to crawl.  She'll start off taking some steps, lose her balance and fall and then crawl the rest of the way.  And over the last two weeks with all of the decorations out, she has broken a total of 5 ornaments.  :)  More on our little sassy girl later...  Carter has been so much fun and has loved everything about the holidays.  Evy, our Elf on the Shelf, has been making his way around our house.  Some of his favorite locations have been by Carter's Christmas tree in his room, in Carter's stocking, on top of our Christmas tree, and by a pile of flour that he'd made snow angels in.  Carter says he even saw Evy sneak into his bedroom one night.  Oh the mind of a 4 year old!

Notice where Carter put all of the "fun" ornaments....on the very bottom of the tree.  So cute that we just couldn't move them!  :) 

Last Thursday we surprised Carter with a trip to the Polar Express in Boone.  The train left at 6:00pm and we thought it was about a 45 minute drive, so we left our house at 5:00.  Later than we'd hoped, but it was hard to leave any earlier.  Unfortunately, traffic was terrible and by the time we got to Madrid, we knew that we weren't going to make it.  After a phone call, they rescheduled us for Saturday morning and we turned around and headed back to Des Moines.  Carter was so disappointed.  We ended up riding the train at Valley West Mall instead - an easy second choice - but still not the Polar Express!  So Saturday morning came along and we made it in time (thank goodness!).  But as we started to get the kids out of the car, we realized that Carter wasn't wearing shoes.  Yep...that's right...we were attempting to ride the Polar Express for the second time, and our kid was in socks.  Nice.  Cary tried to take Carter to find some shoes in the 30 minutes that we had to spare while Brynn and I got the tickets and tried to board the train.  About 15 minutes before the train was departing, Cary called me and said that they were on their way back (still without shoes) and that they were stuck behind a train and couldn't get there until the train passed.  Seriously?  Luckily, they made it with about 5 minutes to spare. :) 

Carter really liked the train ride, but Cary and I were on the fence about it.  First of all, the train wasn't heated so we were pretty cold. Next time (if there is a next time) I'll bring a blanket. Secondly, it's about an hour ride and since we'd driven an hour to get there, that was a long time for Brynn to sit still.  She was a bit high maintenance, but as long as we kept feeding her and reading her books, she did okay.  We probably won't ride it again next year, but seeing the smile on this guy's face made it worth it!!!

Last night we hosted our church group's Christmas party.  We had the food catered which made the whole thing so easy.  The ugly sweaters were awesome and it was fun to see some new faces and meet some new members of the church.  Let the holiday party season begin!!!