Christmas tree and Christmas baking!

Well, it's five days until Christmas, and we have been busy! We finally got our tree up a few weeks ago, and I am so excited to have our first Christmas tree in our new house! Not only do we have the perfect front room and front window for it, we have taller ceilings in this house so we were able to get the big tree that I want to get every year and we never can! 

We actually ended up being a little overzealous and the tree was too tall for this room. We thought about leaving it in the entry way, but in the end I really wanted it in front of the window so S had to get out the saw and bring it down to size a bit!

Decorating the tree is a tradition I look forward to  every year. I love going through our old ornaments and explaining their meaning to the kids. With that being said, as much as I love it, giving young children fragile ornaments to hang on tree branches stresses me out, and add in that our new floors our all tile...... well, I think we are lucky that we got out of it with only three broken balls!

I also managed to get all of our Christmas baking done, despite being a million months pregnant. It took me two days of baking and I exhausted, but we ended up with lots of yummy treats to give to all of our friends and neighbors... not to mention plenty of leftover for this pregnant mama to snack on!

And now I"m going to try and spend the next five days relaxing and soaking up the end of the season!

Maternity/Family Photos

OK, huge picture post ahead! We went back and forth on whether or not we wanted to do any sort of maternity pictures this time around. Originally I decided we wouldn't, we would just take some of our own pictures to announce the baby on our Christmas cards. (Obviously, most people know at this point, but we never made any sort of social media announcement so our Christmas cards will be our way of telling people we don't talk to on a super regular basis). Anyway, as we got closer I started seconding guessing myself and decided to put out some feelers for a new photographer and see if we could find someone. We ended up finding an amazing girl who came highly recommended (and didn't cost a fortune!) and I. Am. Obsessed. Seriously, I could not be happier with the way our photos turned out. The setting was beautiful and I think she got such amazing shots of our family. And being eight months pregnant and basically feeling like a whale, it's saying a lot that I love the way we all look in these!

Like I said, I am in love and can't wait to put our favorites on Christmas Cards and then print a bunch to hang in our home!

 

Tis the season!

You guys know how obsessed I am with our new house, and getting to decorate it for Christmas has been the icing on the cake for me. Christmas, and all the decorating, is my absolute favorite time of the year, and getting to finally do it in a house I love and that I know is our forever home was amazing.  The only problem is I feel like I need to bulk up my Christmas collection big time since this house is bigger!

But, I'm still pretty happy with the way things are starting to look, our household is definitely feeling festive! I'm going to end with a few pictures of our progress so far!

Gingerbread Houses!

We had our first official "Christmas Activity" the first weekend of December, when Frosty showed up with a gingerbread village kit! The boys were so excited to build their own individual houses!

Just look at these adorable, excited faces!

We've had a couple major fails in terms of gingerbread houses the last few years, so I"m pretty proud of how great these turned out! Now to keep the kids from snacking on them!