Four Days of Festiveness

It has been a lovely Thanksgiving weekend. Four days is always a nice respite from work and schedules and everything else, but something about knowing, with absolute certainty, that no blackberry new email alert can touch me, makes it particularly wonderful. I do genuinely miss some of the work I used to do at the firm (and I definitely miss the salary), but weekends like this make me wonder how I could ever go back.

 

On Friday we headed downtown to attend the Fort Worth Parade of Lights. We parked in my office garage and walked a few blocks over to our reserved seats (best decision ever- $28 for the whole family, proceeds to charity, and we had 2nd row seats we didn't have to set up or get there early to reserve ourselves. It was my one carefully selected splurge of the Thanksgiving weekend, justified by reminding myself we didn't have to pay for gas to drive to visit anyone.)

 

The parade consisted of 106 entries, mostly firetrucks, high school marching bands, and a LOT of horses, all bedecked in lights. Notable entries included a Scottish bagpipe club, miniature horses pulling carts, a dozen Elvises riding motorbikes, the Fort Worth unicycle club, and bedazzled fire trucks from every town in the metroplex. The kids LOVED it.

 

Santa and Mrs. Clause were on the last float and then we high-tailed it out of there to get home for a late dinner and the reading of our first Christmas book of 2012.

 

On Saturday we drove out to Flower Mound to go to a Christmas tree farm. We thought we'd be cutting down a tree, but as it turns out, we were just selecting them from a forest of stands.

 

Still, the kids had fun with the hay bale pyramid, merry-go-round of death, multiple bounce houses (which explain why Landon isn't in any pictures- we couldn't get him out of there), and little play jail that I think must have been left over from a haunted maze the farm puts on every Halloween.

 

We selected a very handsome tree and decorated it that night.

 

As usual, the kids were more excited about taking out and playing with the ornaments than actually putting them on the tree.

 

Though Claire did get pretty excited about creatively hanging up the super cheap, breakable little balls that were all missing hooks.

Innovation!

I found them hiding behind the tree for the rest of the evening, it's their new favorite hang-out spot.

 

JP has been busy all day covering our giant tree with all the lights we own (15 strands for one tree trunk; I can't help but think how pretty my house would have been all lined in lights, but wrapping a tree in lights has always been an odd dream of his and who am I to stand in his way?) and I love seeing him so happy, even if he tries to turn off my Christmas music every time he walks by the speaker in the kitchen.

new view from the back windows when we come home at night

I read this post on Momastery a few days after I posted this one here and it sums up so nicely why I like getting everything done early for the holidays- though in my case, it's not the kids who have the gimmes, it's me. At first, I started doing all of it early when I was at the firm and realized that while I couldn't predict my schedule in December, if all the "must do's" were done, I could at least enjoy the precious moments of down time without running to stores or stressing about my to do list. And now that my schedule is predictable, it's still so nice to be done and just enjoy my family and all the fun activities that pop up around this time of year. And this year in particular, with no room in the budget for all the extra "perfect" items I'm certain I would find in stores and online if I allowed myself to look, it's enabled me to simply enjoy my husband and kids while we play in the leaves in the front yard and snuggle on the couch watching Christmas specials.

nap time; with snowmen stolen from the couch decor

The kids are sleeping, JP is anxiously awaiting nightfall so we can turn on the giant tree o' lights for the first time, and I'm about to make a turkey pot pie with Trans-Siberian Orchestra playing as loud as possible without waking the little ones. I hope you all had a fun, restful, thankful weekend!