Christmas time is here......

Hands down, Christmas is my favorite holiday! I love the lights, the music, the decorations, the snow (eventhough we don't get that here in the south). It usually takes me a few days to get all of my decorations up. Just putting the lights on our 12 foot tree can take up to 3 and 1/2 hours. I try to get half of my house done just before Thanksgiving and the other half right after. This year for some reason I drug my feet getting it all done. The storage boxes sat out for a couple of weeks, but finally I got my act together and got everything up. I suppose as I get older, I'll cut down on what I do, but for now, I like our house to look like Christmas exploded. It does take a while to plug everything in, and then unplug everything.....one of these years I'll invest in the clapper!

The big tree in our keeping room.This tree is covered in angel ornaments that I've collected from our different vacations. This one is from Virginia.

Our Family room tree. It's supposed to be stripped like a candy cane, it doesn't look so good. We like to put a real tree in this room and this year I really wanted a flocked tree. Since I can't have snow outside, why not inside? So thinking I was so clever I bought the cans of flock so I could do it myself and save money. Well, I coated the thing twice and it just gave it a dusting of white, making it look dead. Oh well, next year I'll just pay for the real thing.

When Mike and I first moved out to Georgia I was pregnant with Braxton. I'd had some complications with kidney stones, so the pregnancy was pretty awful. I was homesick and lonely, because Mike was in school leaving me home alone a lot to ponder on my sad life. :) When December came I was very excited, we had planned to go back to utah to spend Christmas with my family. I was 6 almost 7 months pregnant, but I really needed to go home. A couple of weeks before we were to leave I ended up in the ER with pain, which had started contractions. After tests and xrays they found a very large stone that was blocking my kidney. So that night I was admitted into the hospital and scheduled for surgery the next day, as they were worried I would miscarry or lose the kidney all together. They removed the stone and put in two stints. Now having one stint, without being pregnant, is very uncomfortable, having two and being pregnant is down right miserable. On top of that the Dr let me know, that under no uncertain terms was I to travel anywhere! My life was coming to an end!

Mike drove me home from the hospital and tried to convince me that we'd still have a great Christmas. But there was nothing he could do or say to make me feel better. When we got into our apartment there was this Christmas village that Mike had gotten for me. My mom had one just like it and I'd always wanted one. It was one of the sweetest things Mike has ever done for me.

This is the University of utah tree in our dining room. When I worked at the U, my employer gave me a U of U ornament, since Mike graduated from there I thought it would be cute to do a theme tree. Go Utes! Yeah, I'm really an Aggie.