Christmas Time at the Marshalls!

Yes, yes, yes . . . . I have heard it all before! It is not even Thanksgiving yet and we have the Christmas tree up. Christmas gets earlier every year. Yes I know it is only the second week of November, and we are probably the only people in the world with our Christmas tree up already (except for the hicks down the street who have snow globes in their yard and Christmas lights hung all over their house to rival the Griswold's) but I can't help it! I LOVE CHRISTMAS! Especially now that we have kids. I love seeing the Christmas tree up with presents underneath it, and I love seeing Parker excited for the presents.

Their are ulterior motives too I guess. We tend to work for MONTHS at getting Christmas presents together. It's usually like we are walking around a store somewhere and see somethig we want to get Parker and there's a timeline - if it's after his birthday in August, we justify buying it by saying it's for Christmas. And then it gets set in our closet and soon the closet gets full and makes it hard to fit all other items in it, so to regain the space I wrap the presents.

And then after wrapping the presents I realize I really don't have any more space in the closet than I did before. So I start placing random Christmas decorations around the house, until Eric is brainwashed into thinking it is time to put up the tree. The I say something like "I think you should clean out the closet under the stairs" and when Eric takes out the tree box, I grab it and run off with it. Then the tree is up, with lights on it (which is fairly easy seeing as how the tree is pre-lit) with trimmings, ornaments, and star on top, before Eric even knows what hit him.

Usually Parker has become enamored with the tree by this point (and this year Preslie has liked it too) that Parker gets hysterical when Eric says "It's too early to have that up, take it down" and I say, "But your son will be so sad" and then it stays.

Ulterior motive number two: it keeps us in line for how many presents we buy. Purchasing presents two to three months beforehand, and not having them out on a counter somewhere to show us that indeed we do already have forty-five presents for Preslie, we really don't need that My Little Pony for Preslie, no matter how cute it is - it would become very easy to OVER BUY for Christmas.

So here we are, November 13th, and we have the stockings hung, Christmas tree up, and all the presents are organized under the tree. We still have a few last minute gifts to buy for family, but it's almost completely done, which makes me extremely happy. I like making caramel hot chocolate and sitting on the couch with Eric with the tree lights on - it is AWESOME!

Our Christmas tree!

See how upset Eric is about the tree being up, he won't even smile!

Preslie has started crawling! Usualy it is an army crawl or a bear crawl where she tries to move around with her feet and hands on the ground, stabilized by her head. Sometimes she even chews on her clothes, it's like she doesn't know we already have a family dog to chew things for us!