Christmas Concerts

 The kids did a great job with their Christmas concerts. Maeve even had a group solo! Kyle enjoyed watching his sisters and we were fortunate to have all Grandparents join us too.

Eric's 39th Birthday

Eric celebrated his birthday this year with working and time with Kyle while Cecilia had a play date and Kate and Maeve were at Feed my Starving Children for a Brownie event. Then we enjoyed dinner at Tavern 4&5 - food was good - but they didn't give him a birthday dessert! So we enjoyed a cherry tart from Patisserie Margo afterwards. We sang 'Happy Birthday' and I think it was the first time in a long time that no one cried during it!

Christmas decorations

We enjoy many things about Christmas time but having the house filled with Christmas memories through our decorations is always fun. This year a new friend arrived from the North Pole that the kids named Gummy Bear the Elf. He's exploring all the different parts of the house and even helped us track down the mysterious advent calendars that arrived at the house - turns out they were from St. Nick but since Mom and Dad didn't put their shoes out he left it outside in a package that we found later.

Like the past few years we picked out a real tree at OLG and went with a Balsam Fir this year as the smell was superior to the Fraser Fir. Eric spent many hours volunteering as the Treasurer of the Men's Club and unloading trees and assisting families with picking out their trees. 

The girls also helped fix about 100 lights that were broken from our older fake tree.

And then we bought a new tree for upstairs for the kids to decorate and of course the lights were broken when we got it but Eric fixed it and we're hoping it works for another couple of years.

Our new ornaments were plentiful this year - The Capri bell from Italy, Disney 50th anniversary, National Aquarium in Baltimore, Newport, Rhode Island, Sea World, Mystic Aquarium, Pinocchio from Italy and a peach from Savannah.

We had lots of opinions and helpers this year with the village. Maeve even designed a tree farm with a photographer and Grandpa Ed helped with the design and assembly.

A new stand for the Angel and even the Dollhouse was decorated by Maeve.