whew! what an event

Since the beginning of our married life together, Steve and I have had a family tradition to put up our Christmas tree on Grandpa Solomon's birthday on Dec. 3.  Since he passed before we had children this is a way we can remember him.  Sometimes we read letters he wrote about his family and other times we just put our tree up and remember it was his special day.

This year we had a trillion things going Dec. 3. but we still managed to get our tree up just not completely decorated.  Whew...I had no idea getting teenagers schedules together and putting up the tree was such a big ordeal! 

Leah sang in her school chorus program at the Bethlehem marketplace.  This is the neatest program put together by another church. It was amazing and real!

 So Sunday we dedicated to put the decorations up and finish the tree after church.  Well we ended up getting four or five things...we had to do...visits to us, extra church meetings, ooops forgot homework,  the boys were asked to do more church visits and while I realize these things are important part of life-I only wanted an hour of two of their time! Steve and I kinda got in a disagreement before..so we were not in the best mood.  Nice how Satan can sneak in when you are trying to do good stuff!   I finally got them together tired and dreary and not exactly in the mood to do a tree. BUT oh did they pep up! 

Our sleepy elf!

Here's the crazy crew!

So the boys found joy in torturing Caroline by hanging non ornament objects on our tree.  We found duct tape, wii control, plastic forks and other things.  As fast as she could take them off, they would put them back on. Poor kid

Andrew keeping it real...singing to us!

Dear ole' Dad unpacking it all and trying to keeping his patience!

Finally we finished our tradition, watched the Christmas program and heard the beautiful messages of the prophet and ate sugar cookies!

So thankful for my crazy kids in my life and that I get the opportunity to be a mom!

***check out our little Christmas tree!  A few years we bought this tree when our house was for sale over the holidays...we never replaced it with a bigger one!  Blake and Andrew are almost as tall as the tree!!!****

Blake's year to light the star!  It was a true event!!!(HA  HA)