Christmas Time Is Here!

We put up our tree last night. It looked so pretty.


We had a lot of fun decorating. Jenny loves working on the ornaments -- particularly adopting some of the old ones as her own. Like Lee's Queen Amidala - Jenny just marked out the L on the bottom of that one and changed it to a J. It's quite amusing.

This morning while I was eating a bowl of cereal, I heard a crash. I went in the other room to look and saw a couple cats running away, along with this.


Jenny's sorting through all the ornaments now. We're going to try to get it back up after dinner and hope that the cats will leave it alone. I actually had it tied to the cord from the blinds, so it fell sideways onto the couch instead of forward onto the floor, which I think may have saved some ornaments. I'm glad I got a picture first.

Here are a couple pictures of the girls from last night. Jenny was very into the decorating, and Reagan lost interest after a couple minutes as usual.



A couple more pictures before I get to a couple stories. We had to get a new TV because the sound quit working on ours, and it's not much fun to watch TV without sound. I was very proud of myself because I was able to put together the heavy table I got for it with very little assistance, and I think it looks quite nice. Note the Steeler on the screen. The second picture is of all the toys that remain in the family room. I did a major clean-out to make room for the tree and all the Christmas presents that will arrive. Now the girls will only have one toy bin and their kitchen and a small container of art stuff. It's so nice.



Now for stories. The first is from Reagan this weekend. We went to see the Nutcracker this weekend, and really enjoyed. I had Reagan in my lap the second half, so I got to enjoy her interesting questions, clearly not related to the Nutcracker as far as I could tell.

She whispered, "Do whales have blood?" I told her they do and that we should wait until after the show to discuss it.

Her response: "Well, on Dora one time they went inside a whale. Do sharks have blood?" I told her they do and convinced her to move on until we got home.

When we got home, I told Lee about that amusing conversation and Reagan came in to continue it. "Do pig's butts have blood? Do all animals and people have blood? Oh, of course they do because when the monster bites them, they bleed. But we're okay because daddy has a sword."

Reagan is crazy.

Now, Jenny. On the way home from work today, she told me about the bad dream she had last night. She's been a little obsessed with wars lately, so this was how it went.

"We were just enjoying our happy lives. Then this boy came and said that I had to be in a war against North Carolina. He said that if I didn't want to be in the war, then I would have to hurt myself, like scrape myself. I told him I would just scrape myself because I don't want to be in a war with North Carolina where I live. And I told him that he's in North Carolina and that most people here would not want to fight against North Carolina since it's where they live. I told him he might want to go to New York to find people."

Then Reagan told me she had a dream to tell me about. And then she tried her best to exactly repeat Jenny's dream.