Happy December!

I've been a bad, bad blogger this past month! Life has just been busy and the hustle and bustle of the Christmas season has definitely begun in the Beers' household! I have lots and lots of photos to upload and many fun stories to share!

We had a wonderful Thanksgiving and a LOVELY nice long weekend. It was a much-needed break from the daycare. We adore our daycare kids, but sometimes it is just nice to have a few days of less noise. My dad came to Fort Wayne to visit for one full week and it was nice to have him here when we had a four day weekend. We had Thanksgiving dinner at my mom's house and also at Matt's parents' house on Thanksgiving day. The day after Thanksgiving was spent putting up Christmas decorations and making a nice dinner here at our house for our family and my brother and my dad. I was wiped out by the end of that day! We were able to relax quite a bit with my dad while he was here visiting. Jack and grandpa did lots of crafty activities. They made turkeys from thier handprints and feathers and they also made Christmas bread dough ornaments. We ran out of time to paint the ornaments before my dad flew back to Arizona, but we will do that soon.

We had our Christmas celebration with my dad a few days after Thanksgiving. It was really fun because my dad has never been here on Christmas, since he lives far away. I was really glad he got to watch Jack open his gifts! Jack received a HUGE pirate ship and also this really cool internet game that he can play on our computer. It is awesome because he can't accidentally open any other files on our computer (over and over and over again) or find his way to internet sites that he should not be viewing. He LOVES playing these games on the internet! You use arrow keys and the mouse and he caught on really quickly to using a mouse! Very cute!

We had a bunch of randomly wierd things happen with Christmas lights this year....first of all.....after much debate, we decided NOT to hang up Christmas lights on the very top of our roof....too high, too scary for me to watch Matt way up there. So, he hung up lights from a ladder on the lower roof lines. This decision, of course, was made after Matt had made TWO trips to Meijer in one night to get the right kind of icicle lights (in his first trip, he got home and then realized that he had purchased some white icicle lights and some mulit-colored icicle lights....and we just wanted white ones....so he had to go back and get more of those.....). Then, half of our mulit-colored Christmas tree lights didn't work when we were getting ready to string the tree with lights. We changed the fuses, checked the bulbs and everything. We're still not sure why they didn't work! So....Matt got to run to Meijer again to get more multi-colored lights for the tree. I am the one who puts the lights ON the tree....because I like to wrap the lights around each individual branch, and Matt just sortof throws them around the tree a few times. It takes a long time for me to get all the lights on the tree because it is a very slow process! Anyway, I was literally almost done stringing on the lights and suddenly they ALL went out. Hmmmmm......we tried figuring out what had gone wrong, and just couldn't get them to work.....so we took ALL the lights down and tried a different outlet technique (I think we had too many strands plugged in end-to-end). Finally, we got it done! We have a 7 foot tall tree and we put 14 100-light strands on it. You can never have too many lights on a Christmas tree! Jack was quite helpful when we were getting all of the decorations out. He lined up all the strands of lights for me as I was hanging them on the tree.

We started a new tradition this year with our Christmas Advent countdown. We purchased 24 Christmas socks and filled each one with a little toy or a piece of candy. We strung them all up the stairs and each day (starting December 1st) Jack gets to take down one Christmas sock and open it up. He has had a ball so far!

Macy is doing great! She is still quite content to laying around and not moving much. She has tried rolling over a few times, but has never quite made it.....I think her big belly gets in the way. She went to the doctor last week and weighed 16.5 pounds (95%tile for weight) and is almost 24 inches long (30%tile for length). We recently started setting her in the Exersaucer and she loves it!

These photos pretty much capture how hard it is for us to get a good photo of BOTH of them together. Either one of them is crabby or one of them is not cooperating. Usually Jack is both crabby and uncooperative when it comes to photo shoots, but every once in a while Macy gets a little crabby too.....mostly when we try cramming in some shots when she's ready for a nap.