Are you ready?

I *think* we’re ready.  At least I hope we are!  All that’s left for me to do is order the gro­ceries (I’m doing this online and then going to pick them up on Wednes­day I think).  All of the presents have been pur­chased and wrapped and I can­not wait to GIVE all of our gifts this year.  It’s def­i­nitely more fun than receiving!

Last Fri­day Tyson had his lit­tle Christ­mas pro­gram at preschool.  While the pro­gram con­sisted mostly of a local choir singing some songs, at the end, the kids got to join them and sing a few songs.  they were SO cute!  And Tyson did great and knew most all of the words to the songs (and I could even hear his cute lit­tle voice singing).

Here’s a lit­tle snip­pet of Rudolph the Red Nosed Rein­deer.  He get’s VERY into it about 1/3 of the way in.

Last night I was play­ing with a fun lit­tle tech­nique on how to get “shaped” bokeh.  This was a good learn­ing expe­ri­ence for me because for the first time ever, I had to man­u­ally focus.  But it was SO cool!  I’m try­ing to fig­ure out what other shapes I could do…

This was just a star­burst sort of shape

This was my attempt at a snowflake shape, but clearly, I need to work on my snowflake cut­ting skills…maybe Tyson can help me!

And last, but not least, Christ­mas tree bokeh!

So, what do you think?

Decking Our Halls…

This will prob­a­bly be the last year that we’ll be in our lit­tle house for the Hol­i­days (more to come on that soon I’m hop­ing!)  So, it was very bit­ter­sweet dig­ging out all of our Christ­mas stuff.  We are tak­ing it easy this year and I’m not putting up my Christ­mas in the City vil­lage, but it will def­i­nitely be up in our new house next year.   Tony was VERY happy to be dig­ging every­thing out of the crawl space for the LAST time.  He only said maybe 15 curse words this year instead of the usual 50 or so

Tyson was AWESOME at dec­o­rat­ing the tree this year.  As you may recall last year, he con­cen­trated the major­ity of the bulbs in ONE spot on the tree.  But this year, he was a dec­o­rat­ing rock star and even wanted to put the star on the top on (which I tried to let him help with, but it’s Swarovski, man!)

Here’s Tyson hard at work and VERy focused

And since his Daddy was mak­ing weird faces and poses for the cam­era, guess who else had to do it??!

And I’m SO proud of myself for tak­ing all of these with­out any flash (yay, me!)

More focus and concentration…

That smile…and my attempt at get­ting some Xmas tree bokeh!

What the Princess thinks of our Xmas tree…let’s pray she doesn’t start crawl­ing until after it’s all down because then I think she’ll LOVE it!

And I’m in LOVE with our new stock­ings that I splurged on this year.  And it was awe­some to finally be able to use the 5th stock­ing holder that I’ve had for the last 5 years

Had SO much fun tak­ing this pic, I’ve always wanted to get one with the “glow” of the Christ­mas Tree.  It took my tri­pod and lots of test shots, but I LOVE it!

It’s been so awe­some get­ting these annual orna­ments, some­day I’ll have a whole tree full I hope!