Time for Red Dresses!

Jeanie and I noticed that our girls had on almost matching red dresses this Sunday, so we had to get pictures of the girls together. And yes, they are barefoot...since it's been in the 70's this week! Wonderful, but not really feeling like Christmastime!

Tis the Season...

...for Baking! Two days this week have been given to some serious baking with Jeanie...we decided to bake cookies for the neighborhood and hand them out with invitations to our church's Christmas Eve service. I'm looking forward to meeting some neighbors I don't yet know. Behold the fruits of our labor... Are you hungry?



Another "baking" endeavor, which has occupied our kitchen table in its entirety for the last few days, is a gingerbread house that our college group made. It's quite impressive, with a garage, car, and swingset and all. It's actually a contest within the college group of who can build the best house. The other part of this equation is whose house can blow up the best. Yes, you read that correctly. What you can't see is that this house is loaded with all kinds of firecrackers (notice one inside the chimney), and beautiful house is going to be blown apart to smitherines come Tuesday. Ah, well, I suppose there had to be some interest for the guys in all of this! :)

Stage 1
The finished masterpiece

...For Baking!

Christmas Time...Already?!?

I must admit, December has snuck up on me this year. The last two years I put Christmas stuff up around the house the day after Thanksgiving, and as of now, none of it is even down from the attic. And I even found myself thinking I might forgo decorating the house this year *ghasp!* Okay, so I won't really forgo it, but I did think about it. So perhaps after I get done with this post I will haul the tubs down from the attic. We are looking forward to traveling to see both of our families again this year, which is always a fun time for us. Oftentimes people look amazed when I tell them our agenda of traveling, but for us, we love spending the time with each of our families. I think part of what has helped is that Christmas has never really been tied to a specific day, so most of our real celebration times are not on the 25th. We have ours the 17th or 18th, then with the Swans on the 24th, then with my family around the 28th. I do look forward to establishing some more of our own traditions as Kathryn gets older. One of our favorite traditions is decorating an ornament each year by writing around the outside all the things that characterize that year. So this year we will have Kathryn's birth, moving back to Charlotte, Nick starting his new job, etc. And then we stick a rolled up piece of paper inside the ornament with all of our prayer requests for the coming year. I don't remember all of what we put on last year's, but I know we included a healthy baby, and that we would be able to come back to Charlotte. It is such a neat time of seeing how the Lord has answered prayers, both in ways we hoped for and ways that surprised us. So now let me hear from all of you- what is your favorite Christmas tradition? You can write about them in your comments. :)

I think this is our final Christmas picture...and in case I don't manage to get it printed in time and distributed, I thought I'd put it on here as well. Thanks to Jeanie for taking the picture!