It's beginning to look a lot like Christmas

The cookies have been baked

The homemade gifts have been finished

The presents have been wrapped in cute paper

The fire is burning bright

The good deeds have been done (like paying for drinks for the person behind me at Starbucks)

And I've marked off most of my Thirteen by 2013 list. Here's to a Christmas filled with fun and excitement!

Christmas this year ...

... will be a little different for us. My Dad and step-mom live in North Carolina and have decided to rent a beach house in South Carolina for the week of Christmas. So DH and I are packing up and heading south for Christmas. This means we won't be home to do Christmas in our own house this year. I didn't see the point of dragging down the tree, setting up all the stuff so that I could rush back from vacation to disassemble everything. It just didn't seem like fun to me. (Oh and leaving up the tree after New Year's Eve is just unacceptable in my book) So we've been trying to do things to make the season special for A and J and hoping that they don't notice that we don't have a big sparkly tree this year.

Step one to faking the holidays at our house, put up a tree of some sort. We opted for the Charlie Brown tree. This led to a discussion of why the kids haven't seen a Charlie Brown Christmas. Where did my parenting go wrong?!

Our next festive event was spent looking at lights. Of course hot chocolate and jammies were required to view the lights. Some people go all out like the house above. I could only get part of their house in the photo but their entire yard (front and back) is covered in lights. It's pretty cool. I pointed out an inflatable Snoopy and the girls once again proved that I have failed to raise them correctly when they had no idea who Snoopy was. Next up on our list is watching some Charlie Brown because apparently my kids don't know what good, classic TV is all about. I'm hoping that baking Christmas cookies this weekend will help fill them with the holiday spirit and that nobody will notice we only have one lonely Christmas decoration.

Lately

Here's what has been going on lately ...

We had a sickly child who just wanted to sleep all the time

I continued to try and style my mustard skinny jeans

I got my baking on ... Strawberry Muffins (I should post the recipe)

The 5 lbs box of Cuties won't last long in our house

And we had sickly child number 2 ... who did more puking than sleeping :(

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