a very december weekend

Another busy weekend done and gone.
Filled with getting in the Christmas spirit!!
It helped to see snow flurries off and on all weekend :)


















Friday evening the kids decorated their "kid tree" (with all their kid and kid-crafted ornaments we've collected over the last few years) in the playroom, while Ryan and I worked on our Christmas cards.














Saturday we started out our morning with breakfast with Santa at our neighborhood clubhouse... donuts and cider and crafts, coloring and facepainting with friends...

























































and some time with Santa of course!!
























(wide shot of the main area of our club house from up in the loft. I love our clubhouse all gussied up for the holidays!!)







After we had our Santa fix, we headed out to Columbia to see our good friends and we all had tickets to a basketball game at Mizzou who was playing Oregon! The kids -er, Sawyer- was excited to see the Ducks in action. Even though it was a bummer of a game -- for Oregon fans-- we had fun and had dinner out with the Laughlins after the game.

































if you can't tell, Savannah was not thrilled to be going to a basketball game.





We spent the night out there and went Christmas tree hunting on Sunday. Since we were out there, we decided to try a couple of Columbia tree farms since we've had no luck out our way the past two years with finding a great tree anywhere near us. Unfortunately what we were looking for in a tree (not that it's too much to ask for... we just want a plain old Douglas Fir... 6-7' tall) was not to be found there either.
The kids had fun "hunting" anyway... every tree was the perfect tree according to them!
































































We ended up heading toward home after lunch and kept our eye out for more tree farms on the 90 mile trip home... and ended up buying our tree three miles away from our house in the parking lot of Lowe's.
It's hard to be a transplant from the Northwest when it comes to this aspect of Christmas decorating!! We are just too spoiled as Oregonians and the magnificent (and cheap!) trees we used to find so easily.
Oh well, at least we got a good one... even though it was bought at the store!
We got it in and up last night with the lights on and the star on top... and we're looking forward to a night of trimming the tree with the kids tonight!