It's December!

I love the month of December and the celebration of the Christmas season. We have thus far enjoyed the Christmas season, except for the recent bout of stomach flu that has just spread through our family. I love decorating my house and then when I am done the realization comes that soon I have to put it all away. However, I love the magical feeling around the house. We love to decorate our many trees around the house. The kids each have a tree in there rooms. Trey's is a cowboy tree, the girls is a princess tree, the kitchen tree is Santa with all of the kid's cute homemade ornaments. The living room trees (they are small, thus the plural) are my pretty trees with temple ornaments. And the downstairs tree is more rustic, what Jer and I love. Our tree is a little rustic and old, which is one way of putting it. (it's my parents old one that they gave to me in college because they were just going to get rid of it, but I love the way it looks all decorated. Even though it is an artifical tree it sheds many, many needles so we still feel as if we have a real tree. One year when we get it out of storage I'm afraid it will be almost bald.) Here are some shots of the kids decorating the tree.

Trey made sure that the bottom of the tree was decorated very well. In fact you can see that he is crawling under the tree to make sure it is done everywhere.

Here are the kids in front of the tree. It took several shots to get one where they are all somewhat smiling. Trey is convinced that he can't remember how to smile for pictures right now so it is always a fun adventure to take his picture lately. Also here is our annual family closeup.

When the tree was done being decorated we set up our train that goes around the tree. Trey has loved trains since he was tiny and he has been begging me to get this train out for months. He even started saying about two months ago that all he wanted for Christmas was a new Christmas train that he could play with all the time. You may be thinking, why not just get the train down. Honestly, I really didn't want to dig through all the Christmas stuff to find the train and besides, he has plenty to play with already.

Here he is watching it go. I love the look on his face.

Here is the end result. Jeremy made this gate when Paige was little and getting into the tree. Even though they leave the tree alone now we still love the way the fence looks so we still use it every year. I also love the beginning of December because it means the starting of the NFR. For those who don't know, this means the National Finals Rodeo that is in Las Vegas. This may surprise many of you reading this because let's just say I wasn't the rodeo type growing up. However I have learned to love it being married to Jeremy and I look forward to the beginning of December when we stay up late and watch the rodeo. This year we have been sick and haven't been able to stay up late but thanks to the blessing of a DVR (and sadly I truly consider this a blessing) we have still been able to take in most of the action. There I guess I confessed my secret, it's really pretty fun, you all should try it some time.