Christmas Begins!

The girls have been WAITING WAITING WAAAAAITING for the day they could start decorating for Christmas. And it has finally come! In our seven years of marriage, I have gradually whittled Dallas down to starting Christmas celebrations the day after Thanksgiving - but not a moment sooner!

So here we are - celebrating the start of Christmas with some banana muffins out on the deck. 

Beautiful weather and it is NOVEMBER 27th! How is this possible?! I don't know, but I love it.

The girlies all reading together in the babies' room. I love finding them doing things like this. Looks like Mabel is tapping Olive on the shoulder, trying to get her attention.

Oh hey there, mom! They are so quick to smile and I love that too.

I was trying to clean things up and the babies kept crying, so I turned on the fan and they were mesmerized. Good ole' fan.

It's really tricky to pull out the camera and take a picture without one of the girls realizing the opportunity for a photo shoot. Within seconds of me taking the photo of the babies, Alice ran to get in the picture. 

Followed by Emma.

Really getting into this photo shoot.

And here's Miss Lucy! With her baby doll, of course. She loves her baby dolls and takes such good care of them. 

Okay, okay! Let's move on and get this house decorated! Emma had come into my room around 5 a.m. this morning to wish me Merry Christmas and ask what needed to be done so we could start decorating. I told her we had to finish all our morning jobs and make sure the main floor was all clean before we started decorating. I then fell back asleep while Emma and the girls read books in our closet. 

Emma was super focused all morning about making sure we stayed on task with my to-do list so that we could FINALLY decorate for Christmas. Once we finished everything up and I told them they could open the chest and start decorating, they had everything out within minutes. They were SO happy to see all things Christmas. We really don't have that much and I don't think what we have is super great or anything, but to them, every Christmas decoration is incredible. And I love that, too.

Haha! See that tiny Christmas tree? They've practically already got it decorated and it's only been out like 73 seconds.

I'm not sure what this is - but found this pic on my phone - that's Lucy's foot and Alice's foot with the sock. And Emma's feet are the ones in blue socks. She's the photographer. That's the real reason I'm showing you this pic - all the little feet represent sweet little people. :)

Ah. Here we go. It's a cool design Alice made with these pencils I got when I was a teacher.

We also put up our Christmas lights! I would love to have so much more (and so would Emma, of course), but we did buy a couple more strings this year, so that's good. If we keep buying a couple more strings each year, eventually our house will be totally LIT!

And the tree! I made the girls wait to do the tree til Dallas got home. 

It's a pretty simple tree - but they are totally pleased with it. I mentioned that maybe we should get a bigger, better one next year and they said, "Noooo! We love this tree." They really don't like to get rid of anything. :)

Here's a little video I found on my phone that Emma made. It gives you an idea of how excited she was to decorate. I love that she shows you the little tree in her room.