Here Comes Christmas

Part of our Thanksgiving weekend traditions is the decorating of the house for Christmas. Olivia was particularly excited about all the decorations this year and kept yelling, "Christmas is here!" "Christmas is over there!" and "It's Christmas in baby's house!" One of our favorite comments was one she made right after Niki finished assembling the tree. As soon as she caught sight of the tree (she was busy rummaging through boxes) she ran behind it and then started crawling around under it yelling, "I'm hiding in the bushes."

Our beautifully decorated tree with all the ornaments only about two feet up.

Happy Thanksgiving

Olivia was still getting over being sick so our Thanksgiving was very low key this year. We went for a nice walk and checked out our favorite open field where Olivia immediately went exploring and then began picking grass and putting it on her head.

After she took a good nap, we broke out the Halloween pumpkins that we never got around to carving and made some festive ones to decorate the house for our dinner.

Olivia was a bit concerned about some of the pumpkin goo sticking to her hand.

The second pumpkin has a worm and a lady bug (minus the spots)

Our New Addition

Our family just got a little bit bigger with the addition of Olivia's first pet. We are still trying to come up with a name. He was originally called Dartanian but it is a bit difficult for Olivia to say. She has lovingly been calling him Manster or This Guy. It took about a day to convince Olivia that this was in fact a hamster and not a rat and the two of them are getting along very well. Manster is tolerating his new owner very well (he's very sweet) and Olivia could not be more excited to play with him, feed him, and watch him run around in his cage.

More Faces

Cake Delivery

Olivia has been doing a lot of baking this month perfecting her holiday breads. Because she still has quite an aversion to bread, we call it cake. This week she made a beautiful loaf of zucchini cake with walnuts and decided to share it with some of our neighbors. Usually we just carry the slices but today she made an official delivery with her bag. She even did a double check to make sure she had the cake secure before heading down the block.

New Tires

New tires for Niki's car arrive.

The Ceiling

One of the major projects started towards the end of October was the sanding and painting of the living room ceiling followed by the installation of crown molding. We still have some touch up work to finish but the final result is really spectacular. Like all the other home improvement projects, Olivia wanted to be in the middle of it all and was a little bit frustrated that she couldn't reach high enough to put up her scrap piece of molding.

So, she found a way to entertain herself while Niki did all the hard labor.

Amateur Photographer

One of our favorite things about downloading pictures from our little camera is the plethora of shots that Olivia always seems to sneak in. These first two we can tell she is sitting at the computer, obviously by herself and the other two are somewhere in the house. It's just always surprising to see how many times she was able to play around with the camera without us knowing. Unfortunately this month we didn't get any long movies of the wall or floor.