Ornamentation

The Christmas spirit is now full-blown around here!  Last night my friend Charity hosted a 2nd annual Ornament Exchange party.  I, of course, procrastinated until basically the last minute to make my 16 ornaments and finished up during nap time yesterday.  Probably should have started a bit earlier!  But finish I did and fun I had at the first official Christmas party I've attended for the season.

 {a few friends had already left by the time we took the picture}

For my ornament this year I decided to go with something cheap and easy.  {In theory}.  They ended up being free (only because I had everything on hand already and didn't need to go to a store for anything new) and not so easy.  My original plan was to knock them all out on Tuesday but that did not happen.  Tuesday was just one long, aggravating, annoying day with interruption after interruption after interruption.  Honestly, it's only two days later and my mind has already completely blanked out on what exactly happened all day long but what DIDN'T happen completely were the ornaments.  Luckily, I got them finished up enough that a couple hours spent during nap time the next day was enough to polish them up.

My go-to teacher gift the last couple of years -- a stuffed star with jingle bell.  

All my loot!

In the midst of all the hustle and bustle of this week, I decided to host another ornament exchange for the kids!  I could tell that Grace was REALLY wanting to participate in my ornament exchange last night, so after talking it over with Ethan and Sophie, I decided to host an impromptu kid exchange for this coming Saturday as well.  I'm not entirely sure what Sophie and Grace plan on doing at this point, but Ethan has already knocked his out of the ball park.  After culling Pinterest carefully, Ethan found a really cute {and kid-friendly} penguin ornament to make out of a light bulb.  On Tuesday night (while I unsuccessfully worked on MY project), Ethan finished all of his penguins with hardly any help from me.  I was pretty impressed.  They turned out really cute and I can tell he's pretty excited about them.  Now we just need to figure out to put a hook on them.

 Look at that concentration!

I'm bursting at the seams to talk about the Christmas projects that I've just started today, but you'll just have to wait until after the big day for more details.  Suffice it to say that I {heart} the St. Vincent de Paul Thrift Store.  I may or may not have spent about an hour there this morning with both Alex and Jane in tow during what should have been the start of lunch and nap time.  And yet it was all still worth it because THAT'S how much I love that store!  Hahahaha.  It didn't hurt that at the check-out the workers thought my kids were cute and hilarious as they jumped all over the couches and chairs rather than obnoxious and ill-behaved.  That always makes life much less stressful.  Because let me tell ya, those two can be quite the HANDFUL these days!!!  Especially when deciding to tack on just ONE more errand to run after the thrift store.  Let's just say that I don't think the workers at the Home Depot thought they were quite so cute.  But that's okay -- I made it out of there before any major meltdowns occurred AND I rewarded myself with an early Christmas present to boot.  Nothing says "Ho, Ho, Ho!" like a power sander.  Hahahaha.  Now I just need to figure out what to do with all the paint I'll have leftover from from one of my projects in Santa's workshop.  In a tactical error on my part, I grossly over-estimated the amount of paint needed to refinish a child's desk.  A quart would have probably been too much and I bought a gallon.  Of "Pink Ballet Slipper."  Not my smartest move.  I guess I just like to go big or go home.

This post feels super short, but rest assured that there should be many more posts coming to finish up the month of December and the rest of 2012.  I can't believe the year is almost over!  It will fly by in a snap.