Christmas is a long time!

We're getting close now! Just a little over a week away! The trees are trimmed, the presents bought, plans made. Ella sighed and said to me yesterday, "Christmas is a long time." I'm pretty sure she meant, its a long time until Christmas finally gets here. :-) I told her she didn't have to wait long now. Just a few more days. We'll be visiting Bubba's house toward the end of the week and the present opening extravaganza will begin on Friday and not let up until the 26th. I think the kids are going to be very overwhelmed, overstimulated and overtired by the end of the holidays. But they'll have a lot of fun in the process.

We had a nice weekend. Andrew was in California for Friday and Saturday. He went to his company holiday party and then visited the 49ers for their game Saturday night. The girls and I busied ourselves by visiting with B-pa and Gramma Clare. Ella helped me wrap some presents in the morning. She picked out all the bows. :-) And we had Kelly, Hope and Isabelle over to make Spritz cookie press cookies. Although the girls had fun decorating the cookies with various sugars, I learned I am not adept at using a cookie press. I assured Kelly I make a mean chocolate chip cookie. We'll have to make those next time. It also probably didn't help that I was distracted by talking and having a good time myself. I kept forgetting to set the timer and check on the cookies. I think we'll be making a new batch of cookies to give away to people. :-)

We've started a new activity around here. It seems a lot of our weekends I tend to recuperate from the week and do laundry and random things around the house, while Andrew watches the girls. And Andrew tends to be a bit fixated with football during the day on Sunday (is the season over yet?!). We've decided to do "Family Movie Night" on Sunday evenings. We've viewed Jingle All the Way (we discovered this one was probably not the best choice for 2-4 year olds, more like 9 year olds), Daddy Day Care, and last night we had a special treat. We went to the movie theater to see Alvin and the Chipmunks! It was a really good family movie for little kids. Ella LOVED it! She told us she wants to watch it at home. I told her she'd have to wait a bit for that. She said it was silly how the Chipmunks made such a mess of the house and she thought it was funny when Simon was flying around the fan because his balloon got caught. Even Lily was interested in a good part of the movie too. She did much better than she did with Shrek 3. We would love to hear any suggestions you might have for good (preferably non-animated) family movies for future movie nights!

As we get closer to the holidays, we hope you all are finding the time to get everything done, take a deep breath and relax a bit. Enjoy the holidays and festivities, and time with friends and family! Merry Christmas from the Isaacsons!