O Christmas Tree, O Christmas Tree

It's time to start the Christmas countdown!! I have resisted the urge to listen to Christmas music or make mile-long-lists for as long as I could. Thanksgiving was great. We did all of the traditional Thanksgiving things: stuffed ourselves silly, took long naps, and watched football, but now it's time to delve into the Christmas spirit. (I even gave Thanksgiving the respect of waiting until Saturday before I began changing out my decorations.)

Jake and I broke down and bought a fake tree this year. I like the smell and authenticity of a real tree, but they are soo messy and too much work. We went all over town checking prices against quality. It took several hours before we finally found "our" tree. We knew we couldn't have a huge tree- our living room is only 8 feet tall, but we had never even considered the width of the tree. And for some reason it looked a lot smaller in Lowe's than it does in our living room. It took some rearranging of furniture but we finally got it to fit. While Jake did all the hard manual labor, I made hot chocolate and picked out the perfect Christmas music (Noel by Josh Groban). We had a lot of fun decorating, even though I have decided I need more ornaments since this tree is so big.

Jake (my hunk) put the tree up all by himself, he even put my star on top. We thought we had a 9 foot ceiling (we didn't measure) and so we bought a 7.5 ft tree. Oops. The star is only one inch from the ceiling.

Frank the Cat approves of the new addition to the living room. He wasn't sure at first, because he doesn't like change, but I guess its growing on him. We hung ornaments with bells near the bottom so they make noise when he bumps into them. He leaves it alone when we turn the lights off, but when they go on he loves to cuddle up underneath.

Thanks Sara

A special thanks to Sara for designing and editing our picture! Her photography skills and Photoshop skills are unparalleled. :-)

Photo Tag

Laural tagged me and gave me these instructions:



You go to your pictures folder, choose the 4th picture folder, and then the 4th picture. Post it.

Okay, but Laural I am just going to warn you, I don't think you'll like this. However, that was one of my favorite college memories. Yea for roadtrips!!!!

I tag Alex and Hailie.

Billings or Bust!

I love road trips! There's something very exciting about getting up early in the morning, packing the car, and hitting the road. It's an adventure, a quest. It's fun.




We took a road trip this weekend. I had Friday off anyway, and Jake had Monday off anyway, so I got a sub for Monday and Jake took a personal day of Friday and we headed to Billings, Montana to visit Nate, Sara, and Zsolt. We left around 7:00 on Friday morning (Jake wanted to leave by 4:00 but luckily that didn't happen, I do have limits to my fun). We took the freeway up past Idaho Falls and then in Dillon, Mt we took a highway for a while to trip some miles off the trip. We stopped and ate peanut butter and jelly sandwiches in a small town off the freeway. It was cold and windy but we got out to stretch our legs and sat together at a picnic table to eat. Cozy.

Isn't it beautiful?

This took us a few shots to perfect.

It was wonderful to see everybody. We had a wonderful time. We cuddled Zsolt, watched movies, cuddled Zsolt, read books, let Sara take a billion pictures of us, cuddled Zsolt some more, played video games, went to Hobby Lobby (that store is so amazing it could be a blog on its own), cuddled Zsolt, ate lots of good food, played with the dogs, and then cuddled Zsolt. Did I mention Zsolt? He may have been the center of attention just a little bit. He was really good about being handed around the room like a hot potato except that we weren't trying to get rid of him, we were trying to see how long we could hold him before someone would steal him from us.

Fun times!

Hi sleepy!

It was fun to be so close to Nate and Sara. I would move to Billings in a heart beat if we could see them more often. But as much fun as it was to see them, it was exciting to jump back in the car and speed off into the sunset. :-) Haha. Seriously we ended up driving into the sunet though. It was blinding. Tuff enough!

Holiday countdown . . .

The holiday season finally started when Halloween snuck up on us. Now Halloween is over and its only a matter of moments before it is Thanksgiving and then Christmas. I've been told that Wal-mart had a huge, decorated Christmas tree in the entrance of their store this morning. Ew! Halloween has only been over for a few hours! I think it is so sad that all of the stores skip right over Thanksgiving and go straight for Christmas. Personally, my favorite holiday of the year is Thanksgiving (right next to the Fourth of July). Although I think I like it because it's not as commercialized, so if the stores did recognize it more it might diminish my enjoyment of the holiday. I love to decorate for Thanksgiving. I collect pilgrim sets. I have at least five sets of them. I am trying to limit myself to one set a year, but sometimes I can't help myself if they're cute enough. Also, I made an apple pie this morning, just to get myself in the baking mood. I'm glad I did too. It tasted good but it didn't set up right so I'll need to practice and get it down to an art before the big Thanksgiving dinner! Yum!