Merry Christmas Eve!

I thought I would share a few pics of our decorations today. I'm still working on my December Daily album and all of these pics are going in that as well. I'm up to Day 12! I won't get it finished before Christmas, but I have everything I need to get it done quickly after the first of the year.


Here is one of our new decorations for the year. We found this angel at Home Decorators. (This is Chris' company, the same place we found our clocks.) She stands about 3 feet tall. I just fell in love with her in the store and had to have her! She actually stands in our entry way, but I thought she looked better in front of the tree for a picture.

And here is our annual visit with the big guy.

This is our house with the lights on it. We only do the part that we can reach from the ground. :)

And here is our tree in the living room.


Last night I finished wrapping all the presents and put all of them under the tree. This morning the boys were checking all of them out and I overheard this:

Spencer says to Connor,

"We better practice our kisses and hugs today
because I think we are going to be giving lots of them tomorrow. "

Merry Christmas

New Clocks!!!

This post is mostly so that our family can see that we finally filled the blank space above our mantle! Finally! We moved into this house about 2 1/2 years ago. Every time we have family come visit, everyone always says we need something big to fill the space above the mantle. As you can see in the following pictures our family room is 18 feet high and we finally found something!

This is the before picture to give you an idea of
the space we were looking to fill.

And here is the after.
We found these clocks at Home Decorators Collections. This is Chris' company. We were in the store here last weekend looking at Christmas decorations and came across these clocks. I thought they would be perfect for above the mantle. I have wanted a big clock for this space ever since we moved in, but never found any I liked.

Here is a closeup. The big one in the middle is for Local Time. Then the smaller ones are for times in Los Angeles, New York, Beijing, and London.

Do you think they are on the right place on the wall? I'm not sure if they need to be a little lower or not. Let me know what you think!

Christmas Cards

These are the cards I made for family. I'm pretty sure everyone has got them by now, so I won't spoil the surprise!
The tutorial for these cards is found here. These were pretty labor intensive, but I think they turned out great! I made mine with the Kraft paper from Hobby Lobby. The snowflake stamps are from PaperTreyInk. I just discovered their stamps a few months ago, and they are so pretty! And a good quality. And the edges were done with the handy Fiskars Threading Water punch.

And I even used up some old supplies, i.e those large candy cane and snowmen eyelets.




I made lots of other cards too for friends and Chris' co-workers. I didn't take pictures of those. I feel like all I have done lately is make cards! I think I have made 60 cards so far and I still have a few more to make!

Merry Christmas!

Days 3,4 and 5

I still haven't got past day 5 yet. I really hope to get caught up this weekend. I got sidetracked trying to finish up my Christmas cards. And I still haven't got those in the mail either! Oops! I'm a little behind this year. The month of December just seems to be flying by. I do have most of my Christmas shopping done though! Yea!

Day three is of my Santa Tree Topper.

The writing on the strip seems to be coming off, so I'm probably going to have to redo that.

Day Four is a picture of our tree in the living room.

Day Five is a pretty self-explanatory.

(Except for the fact that this is a completely staged photo!

Sssh, don't tell anyone!)

I hope everyone has a great weekend! I think we are going to see Santa tomorrow. :D

I'm Here!

Sorry I haven't posted in a while. We've been pretty busy. I'm still working on my December Daily album. I have up through Day 5 completed. I hope to post those layouts tomorrow. It is pretty gloomy and rainy here today, so not a good day to take pictures.

On Saturday, we went to the annual Cookie Decorating party. Our friends, Patty and Matt, hold this party every year in their neighborhood and invite us too. They have been doing this the last 4 or 5 years. They hold it in one of their neighbors' heated garage. That is why you see power tools in the background! It is a great place for it though, because once the kids are done decorating, they just lift the garage door and hose it clean. Perfecto!

Here a few pics from the night. Santa Claus even came for a surprise visit!

Connor is working on one of his masterpieces!

This is one of Spencer's. Doesn't it look yummy? (Maybe if you are eight, right? ;) )

And yep, he ate it right away. Can you say sugar rush??!!!!

December Daily Album

I'm off to a fantastic start! It is day two and I'm not behind! Woo Hoo! For those non-scrappers out there who are wondering what I'm talking about, the December Daily album is the idea of the talented Ali Edwards. You can go here to see her fantastic work. Basically what me and a bunch of other scrappers are doing is documenting something every day about how we celebrate the holidays. I wanted to do this last year, but never got to it. I'm really hoping to be able to keep it up this year. I have all the base pages ready, so all I need to do is take a picture every day and do a bit of journaling. Sounds easy, right?! Wish me luck! Here are my first two pages!

The journaling on the 2nd page says, " I normally go to Starbucks once or twice a month. But at holiday time, the Peppermint Mocha Twist has me there a couple of times a week." And yes, I did journal right on the Starbucks thingy. (I'm sure there is a technical word for it but I have no idea what it is, so I'm just going to call it "thingy"!)