Appreciating our kid-decorated tree

Last weekend we got the tree up and decorated. The kids were so excited!

My camera was left in the car and got foggy, but I think this is cute. Rachel's idea!

It was all I could do to get the ornaments out, hooks on, and try to keep the little ones away from the irreplaceable and breakable ones - good luck, right? My children are very energetic (to put it nicely), so with all four working, it was pretty chaotic. We blew threw the ornaments in record time and sat back to look at the tree. It was about the ugliest decorated tree! The kids had put ornaments all together on parts of the tree. This weighed down the branches and left huge holes in the tree. I think it drove Dave a little crazy, but I thought it was fun to watch the kids put the ornaments wherever they wanted. Rachel has a "more the merrier" personality, and you can definitely see that in how she put her ornaments up. This was one of her sections. They were all right next to each, but she thought that looked beautiful.



Here we have 9 ornaments on one branch!



My crazy Zack!

Ho Ho Ho

Well, we went for our annual photo with Santa at the mall. I try to remember to get there in November, but, alas, that was not to be this year. The kids got out at noon the other day, so we decided to try to beat the public school kids to the mall. We had to wait 30 minutes. Not too bad, and I got all 4 kids in a Santa picture. That's a first!



While at the mall, I decided to do some shopping that I could only accomplish at the mall. Amazingly, the kids were pretty good. Of course, we get one nasty lady muttering loudly as she walked away, "what misbehaved children!" I wish I had yelled after her, "Merry Christmas to you, too!" In her defense, Matthew did kick in anger as she walked by and hit her packages and my other three were having a great time riding the mechanical horse machines at Brookstone (very fun!), but I just had to laugh because it had been such a pleasant time at the mall so far. Oh well.

Thanksgiving is my favorite holiday!

I love Thanksgiving. There's nothing to do except eat - maybe watch some football (although this year it was hardly worth watching), play some football, especially with the perfect weather we had this year, and hang out with family. I love cooking and hanging out with my mom in the kitchen. And, Thanksgiving gives us the perfect opportunity to just do this.

This year was particularly fun and a little more hectic because we had my brother's 5-month old triplets with us.

Josie, Mia and Marcus

The babies were a little off schedule in the night, but they were perfect little angels during the day. They always had someone to hold them and new people to look at. They are so sweet.

Mia and Marcus

Alex was really interested in "the boy." He just kept asking which one was the boy. That was the only one he wanted anything to do with.

Marcus

Rachel lived the girls - big surprise! She really got Josie laughing at her here. It was so adorable.



We spent a lot of time and effort trying to get all our group pictures. Getting 7 kids to cooperate was quite a challenge.