The Christmas Season is Upon Us

Here are our new friends Missoni and Alize (pronounced Ally-zay, or Zay-Zay for short) They moved to a place just a couple blocks from us. We like them a lot and see them a couple times a week usually. It was past Zay-Zay's nap time this day, can you tell? It was past Brie's nap time too, can you tell? Probably not so much. Brie is napping less and less frequently nowadays. Sigh. There are days that *I* need her naptime more than her. Oh well. She's growing up!

Chelsea and Brie had a good ol' time "helping" put up the tree and other decorations. Here they are having potato sack races in plastic bags.

Daddy helped Abby participate in decorating the downstairs tree. We have a big tree upstairs and our smaller tree set up downstairs. It has lots of our memory ornaments. You can see the Care Bear ones in this pic. There are all sorts of ornaments that bring back childhood memories. Grandma has also started collecting ornaments for the grandkids-one for each child for each year. They are stored away separately with a note of who it goes to and why it is significant or special. Then when they are grown, they will have a set of their very own special ornaments. I love that idea.

It was a full day of decorating! We haven't taken pictures of the finished decor, but we should. It looks really good!

Nobody was left out of the decorating. Some of the ornaments are even still on the tree, after having been up for awhile now. Ha! Actually there are only one or two that repeatedly keep disappearing or "falling off."

And we finally got a smiley face from Abby! Nevermind the off centered-ness of it, or the tissue laying next to her. I was watching her instead of framing her in the camera.

Here she is talking. Cooing is so cute at her age! Her eyebrows tell more of what she is thinking than her voice does. What do you think she's thinking here?

Abby is my first child to suck on her hands/thumb. Only rarely does she find her thumb, but once in awhile she'll suck her knuckles for fun. The other two never really did that. I don't let her suck her thumb. I don't want to have to help her break that habit later on. I'd rather go with breaking a pacifier habit. She's pretty good about only needing a pacifier to help her go to sleep though. 

Christmas photos coming up!