the big 3

My oldest son turned three and got his first hair cut and his first big boy bed!!!

christmas tree on our steps

While my family snoozed and dreamed someone dropped off a live Christmas tree on our steps.  The 6 foot pine tree was just laying on our steps early Sunday morning.  We actually have a fake tree because with two kids and a Ukrainian Christmas all the way in January, it is just easier for us.  What a sweet surprise though. We don't know who or when this happened or why.  But to whoever you may be, thank you.  Now I am going to cut the branches and make a beautiful arrangement on our front porch.  In fact I have been looking around for some nice branches to do just that.  Thank you!

library shelves and crawling

Finally we built a little library for our kids in their room.  Instead of buying the shelves at Ikea I had the wood cut at Home Depot and my husband did the rest.  My toddler loves it.  He is a few days away from turning three and he loves to look at books and sing his ABC's (as well as "bad, bad day" from Despicable Me movie ).  Some of his favourite books are the Berenstain Bear's "The Bike Lesson" and "The Big Road Race" and Dr. Suess' "ABC".  He knew all the alphabet letters before he was two all from reading the "ABC" book.  We didn't really try to teach him, it was just something he naturally was interested in.    

On another note, my 8.5 month old is finally crawling.  He went from lying down on the rug, to sliding around on the floor like a snail and now crawling.  Oh!  How quickly he went from being a little baby to a little boy!  Too quickly for our liking.  In fact I was taking a photo of the book library when my baby started to crawl.  Now he crawls over to the library and pulls the books down.  

blue, green and tantrums

Lately I haven't been able to get enough of colour, so for the Christmas season our outdoor decorations are all blue and lime green.  This year I wanted to be able to see a wreath on our front porch from the street so I assembled something matching our colours.  I wrapped a simple twig wreath with an old IKEA boxwood garland, added sparkly blue plastic branches from Micheals along with three lime green balls from Wallmart.  I used a wire to hang the wreath at the exact height that I wanted.

On our plum trees my son and I hung blue and green plastic balls.  It was hard for my son to hang the balls with his large mitts, but it was fun watching him work outside and smile at me and give me the thumbs up.  It didn't take long until the toddler temper tantrum appeared but that is to be expected.  Blue, green and tantrums is the theme for our Christmas season.