It is beginning to smell a lot like Christmas

We had a wonderful Thanksgiving full of food and family and enjoyed every second of it. We started off the festivities with Thursday lunch at my parents house and then Friday diner with Ward's family at our house. My sister and I did black Friday shopping Fri at 5 am and had a blast. I also got a lot of shopping done for the kids. We got our first real tree this year and set it up today and got it decorated tonight. It smells heavenly!! I had a real trees My entire life and then started using a fake tree about 6 or 7 years ago. We decided that when the kids were old enough to get it, we would go and get a real tree. Well, this was the year so we all packed up and went to the Christmas tree store. We looked around the lot and found the perfect trees for our house. Sallie was enthralled with the Santa Claus that was dancing around the lot. Anna just wanted to go and touch all the trees. We had a fun day of Christmas music and decorating the tree planned that was fun for about the first 5 ornaments. Then things starting falling and ornaments starting breaking and that was the end of that. We did get the tree decorated however with little assistance from the girls. Anna has since pulled many off that are low to the ground. We got the blow up in the front yard and I love it. Ward actually even admitted that it looked pretty cool. Maybe adding to the blow up collection next year is more in my future than I thought. Anyway, Sallie is really anxious about Santa Claus this year and not scared at all. She can not wait to sit in his lap and tell him that she wants a princess bike now and a jumpy castle. She said the one like they have at leapin lizards. Wow!!! I tried to explain to her that Santa knows what will and will not fit in our house so he may not be able to get that from the north pole. We will see how that goes over Christmas morning. We brought out the elf on the shelf this weekend as well and named him "Roddie". Not sure where this name came from but this is what Sallie wanted to call him. Anna has finally started saying Mama in the last day or two. Now we really know what she wants as she was saying Daddy for everything. She went into the church nursery today without crying at all and even hugged one of the nursery workers that she usually screams with. That was a huge success and relief to me. I always hate leaving her because she acts like that and it was so nice today to leave her happy. We are so excited about the upcoming weeks and all the fun Christmas things going on.