advent calendar - day 1

following in last year's footsteps, we planned on the advent calendar countdown of Christmas activities.  this year, i am obviously not as dedicated to the daily posting on the blog, however.  it's day 14 and i've made no mention of our december so far!  yes, the blog has been somewhat ignored.  let's just say that a LOT of photos have been PRINTED and slid into clear pocket protectors in project life though!

this year, i didn't make a list ahead of time of our activities.  that was not a good idea.  most mornings, i forget about the advent calendar and make ben wait until after breakfast to open it so that i have time to think of something and get it in there!  we have a new calendar this year - i made it at a class but when i signed up, i didn't realize that all those little boxes were made of just cardstock.  they're really not kid-friendly so i've been keeping it up out of reach.  we'll see what what happens next year.

december 1st - go get our christmas tree and decorate it!  this was our first time getting a real tree!

these photos are all nice and beautiful.  the actual day started with an argument between tim and i about whether to go to christmas tree farm to cut down a tree or to go to a tree lot.  i hadn't realized that he wanted to cut one down and i thought that was a crazy idea with little kids standing around waiting for dad to hack through a tree.  we ended up at a great tree lot and got a beautiful tree - probably the most beautiful and most perfect tree i have ever had...we paid the big bucks for the noble fir vs. the douglas fir.  what we did not realize is how much bigger our tree would look in our living room.

on our way home, we stopped at Canadian Tire and bought an extra string of lights to match our others at home.  at home, we pulled out the box of decorations and pulled out our two strings of lights.  i start stringing them which takes forever.  ben is impatiently waiting to begin decorating when one of the strings of lights goes out.  oh brother.  okay, pull that string off.  begin restringing.  go to plug in the new string of lights and the two plugs don't work together!!!  so we only have one string of lights for the biggest tree that we've ever had.  off i go back to canadian tire.  i never even liked the lights we had on our tree so i bought tinier lights.  there's warm, pure, and cool.  i knew we didn't want cool but i thought the warm was a little too yellow so i went with pure.

i get home and we plug in the new lights.  they're not pure.  they're bluer than i thought they'd be.  tim doesn't like them but i'm like, "oh well, we can't delay the decorating any longer - ben has been waiting forever to begin!"  i start stringing the new lights.  halfway down the tree, we realize that we cannot handle the blue light.  much to ben's disappointment, we pull all the lights off, put them back in the boxes, and tim heads back to C-Tire.

meanwhile, i'd planned to unpack and set up our nativity sets on the 3rd as another calendar activity but ben discovered his fisher price set in a box.  augh!  so i brought it out one piece at a time as i told him the nativity story.  he seemed very interested.  after all the pieces were out and the story was done, he asked me to tell it again!  haha.  so that was a sweet moment of the day.

tim came home with 2 boxes of warm lights.  we knew it would be a little sparse on the lights for this big tree but the lights are just so expensive.  i start putting the lights on again, trying to spread them out, only to get to the bottom third of the tree and be out of lights.  tim and i look at each other - another trip?  NO!  tim suggests putting that one old string of lights on even though it's not the same type of lights (we could plug it in the one way but not the other so it could be added to the end but not connected in the middle).   good idea.  i add it to the end and it doesn't look so bad.  the DECORATING can BEGIN!

part way through decorating, half of that last string of lights burnt out.  sigh.