Getting Ready for Christmas

Christmas is my favorite time of year and if it were up to me I would have my Christmas decorations and Christmas music playing all year long. But before we can get to Christmas there are a lot of things that need to happen. First we have to make our lists and turn them in to my sisters and mom by Thanksgiving, then we have to have Thanksgiving, do our Christmas shopping, decorate the tree and the house, make cookies, decorate a gingerbread house, go look at lights, wrap presents, etc. As you can see there is a lot that needs to happen before we can get to Christmas. Below are some of the photos showing what we did to prepare for Christmas this year...our first year in Texas.

This is how we cooked our turkey this year for Thanksgiving. A little nervous it would catch on fire, but the end result was a very juicy and tender turkey. When Zach was trying to carve it the meat would just literally fall off the bone. He was actually able to pull out one of the leg bones completely clean from the meat. It was pretty yummy, this coming from a girl that doesn't really like turkey.

Our Thanksgiving spread....yeast rolls (the best I've ever made), green beans, dumplings and turkey. We also had some pumpkin pie for dessert.

 

After dinner our wild child decided she wanted to try to climb on the back of the couch and slipped off and hit her chin. I first thought it wasn't anything big until I saw the blood building up in her mouth. Zach looked at it and it was a pretty big cut, but it wasn't deep so we just put on "boo boo bunny" and everything was better. The bunny is just a case for ice that makes it not cold for Chloe to hold. Chloe actually didn't mind the cold on her lip. It soon stopped bleeding and our child went back to being wild. She did a good job at keeping the bunny on her lip the rest of the night and part of the next day. There was only minimal swelling because of that.

The decorated tree and fireplace...what more could you ask for.

Chloe was proud of her gingerbread house. She did pretty well for the first half of the roof. Then she realized it was candy we were decorating with and decided to eat some of the candy and just point to where she wanted me to put things. She had fun so that's all that matters. We set it up on our counter in the kitchen and after a few weeks of it being there she remembered that it was candy on the house and started to climb up and steal pieces off. The candy was nasty, but she still liked it.

Levi enjoys helping his daddy work around the house. He was trying to help Zach hold the tape measure and put up a door on our guest room door before my parents came for Christmas.

We had a lot of leaves to clean up since it was finally getting cold out and they all came off the tree. I forgot what living in the Midwest was like with the big trees...I was quickly reminded. Zach taught Chloe how to play and jump in the leaves. She thought it was the greatest thing. She did through her baby doll in the leaves and then Zach jumped after...we lost baby for about 10 minutes until we spread a big chunk of the leaves out in the yard to find baby. He then had to rake them up again and then once we finally bagged them there were about 8 big black trash bags filled with leaves...the joys of having mature trees.

Chloe finally able to enjoy her birthday present that her daddy built. It was chilly, but she has been able to enjoy her new play set.

Chloe became very interested in the presents and the tree. When Zach caught her checking out the presents she said she was just "watching" them. She was so excited about opening presents this year. She did try to steal a few and run away to open them and we had to partially wrap back up a few that she did "accidentally" poke holes in or tear pieces off before Christmas.

We went out searching for lights and spent about an hour driving around looking at lights. Chloe took Minnie Mouse with us and she had to hold Minnie up to the truck window so Minnie could see them too. Then when we got home she had to show Minnie our lights. She wanted to go light by light one by one and show Minnie every single one...she got about 5 or 10 in before we made her come in side because it was cold.

Chloe had a lot of fun sprinkling and decorating the cookies. There were many cookies that just had a bunch of sprinkles in one place, but she didn't care. I tried to have her help me cut out the cookies, but she would just use one cookie cutter and then when I would try to pull it out she would put another one on top. So I decided against that and sent her back over to the other side of the table to decorate.

We always hear about how every year the Batsche boys (including Steve) would get in front of the fireplace and get a picture taken from the back while their butts were in the air and their faces were towards the fire. So this is only fitting that Levi was drawn to the fire and crawled under his daddy's legs and stood up to help with the fire.

Levi again helping daddy light the first fire of the season.

Who could forget the Christmas cheese balls?!?!?!?