FA LA LA LA LA, LA LA LA LAAAA!

We set up for Christmas last weekend!!!

And I don't even care about stupid early-Christmas-setting-up-haters. How does my Christmas tree affect you? And it's not that I am skipping over Thanksgiving. I love Thanksgiving. Why can't I have a Christmas tree up at Thanksgiving? I ave seriously gotten such rude comments the past few  . I don't even care. SCROOGE!

Anywayyyysss. We didn't go as crazy as last year with the homemade decorations. I think we're getting lazy. But We got out all our decorations and the tree! I love the tree!!! I don't have pictures of everything and we have slowly been adding more, but here's some pictures from the merriest night of all!

Lady was there, of course, and was very nervous at first. She hated all the new stuff we were bringing out. This is when I was making the new centerpiece for our table. She just sat there and watched me and acted so depressed. She's very dramatic.

But the second the lights came out, she was a new cat. I have never seen an animal so excited! Nathan even had a few extra bulbs sitting on the carpet and she kept on running up, stealing, one and running away. She would just drop it on the ground and look at it. She loved the lights. She especially loved to bite them.

Since it's probably not a good idea to be chewing on an electrical string of lights, we had to get out the spray bottle and spray her every time she tried to bite them. It took a couple sprays, but she finally learned. We haven't had any problems since, but she sat all night and watched Nathan put up the lights.

We have a tradition that every year we buy a special ornament and write the year on the back. It's the first ornament to go on the tree. This year, we bought a special one for Maddie. I love it! I got to be the one to put the first ornament on this year. I was very proud.

The ornament is a sand dollar (symbolic of the birth, death, and resurrection of Christ), with the words "The ones we love never truly leave us" written across the bottom. There is also a small dove on the top and a small plaque (you can't see it in the picture because it's hanging down the back) that says 2013. We wrote her name and her birthday on the back. I'm so glad we can have this little reminder with us every Christmas, that because our Savior was born and died for us, we can be with Madelyn again.

Our Christmas wreath and kitchen towels!

Apparently, I'm owl obsessed this year, because this is a new ornament I picked out. I love him.

Yes, Lady gets her own stocking. Although, it will probably just be filled with hair ties.

There were several spoon-fulls of cookie butter consumed during this process.

This is a small part of my new nativity. I found the starter portion of the Willow Tree nativity on sale for 50% off. I love it!! We have so many Willow Tree figurines now. I adore them.

I love this hand made ornaments with our names. A family friend, Becky, made them for us last year. They are so freaking cute.

When the tree was all done, Lady just sat and starred at it all night. She was so memorized.

I picked her up to let her get really close to the tree, and all she wanted to do at first was cling to me and purr in my ear. I think she was really feeling the Christmas spirit.

a new adventure

I love blogging. But if you haven't noticed, I have kinda sucked it up big time with blogging lately.
The truth is, it's been a really hard few months. It's still hard, but I'm getting there.
Maybe one day I will talk about the darkness of the past few months, if I can find the right words.

I have felt a lack of creativity and it's affected my blogging.

I LOVE writing, and I hate that I have felt blocked up lately.

I find that the majority of my thoughts are weird, random, and in my mind, ABSOLUTELY HILARIOUS. 

But a lot of my thoughts are strange, and don't fit in on this family yearbook blog.

I turn my blog into a book, and I don't need a whole bunch of weird crap ruining my pictures of fall leaves and cats.

So I started writing down this long, random, "eassy-like" things in notebooks or in microsoft word, just to have the release of writing.

And I loved it.

It brought back my release and my strange creativity.

It was all light-hearted and fun and random and really helped ease some of the heavy things I was feeling.

So I decided to document all the weird places my brain goes in 1 area.

I started a new blog. It's strange and it's really just for me, but I know a lot of my dear friends share my same, strange brain and might want to come along for the ride.

It will be my random thoughts, memories, questions, ideas, rants and all other things that don't fit in on my family yearbook.

I will still be blogging here as well.

You can follow along here if you so desire.

Halloweenie

A week later...

So Halloween, right? I have never been a HUGE Halloweener, but I do like to do a little something. I dressed up in some scrubs for work because I wanted to be comfortable. The kids were hyper as all hell, but we had some fun. I was assigned to chaperone the school dance at the end of the day. My teacher-friend Kara and I decided to dance and make the kids feel uncomfortable, haha. We got some other teachers to join. A lot of my kids thought it was funny and danced with us. Some just laughed. Some filmed it. There's probably a youtube video out there and I don't mind.

Nathan's classes were cancelled so I got us all kinds of candy and ice cream and cookies and he picked up some Chinese. We watched some scary movies and ate and hung out. It was a perfect, low-key Halloween. Nathan dressed up as Where's Waldo at work. I think he's just the cutest.

Lady was there too. We wore her out.

 I had the day after off of work for a grade transmittal day, so Nathan took it off too. We have a delicious breakfast downtown. It was a gorgeous morning!