Merry Christmas!

I am so excited Christmas is finally here! We have been enjoying all of the holiday festivities from pictures with Santa, Christmas music, baking, holiday parties, shopping, wrapping gifts, and decorating our tree. Today is Christmas Eve and I look forward to introducing Ellie to our family traditions that includes the Light Show, lunch, and shopping with my parents, sister, brother and sister-in-law and their two kids. I know she will love it. It will be a weekend filled with family, new memories, and love and laughter.

Merry Christmas!

Nick, Emily, & Ellie

Our Tree!

Ellie's 1st Christmas tree! We bought her a personalized ornament, and we plan to continue buying her a new ornament every year, as my Mom did with me and my siblings. I love that our tree "tells a story" with all of our different ornaments. We have a new red tree skirt from Home Goods ($20) and we hung our holiday cards on our stairway. Here are a few photos:

Ellie helped hang her ornament- the first one on the tree.

Ellie & I hanging a star ornament

 Ellie "crawling" (army crawl) around the floor. Too cute!!

We also finally replaced the vertical blinds in this room with custom dark wood blinds. We love the result! Looks fantastic. Here is a photo, and a separate post will soon follow with additional home updates. I love that you can now see our beautiful lit Christmas tree from outside through the blinds.

 Our house:

Happy Holidays!

Holiday Decorating 2011

I've been decorating our house little by little. Ellie is just getting over being sick. She had a 2 week cold, then last week was diagnosed with a double ear infection, fever, and bad cold. She is on antibiotics for her ears, and luckily they are feeling better. Every day she is more like herself, but it has been an exhausting couple of weeks- for her and I! So, I started decorating last week and have done a little bit at a time. Here are some photos of our Holiday decorating (so far) this year. Check out last year's photos here.

You may remember our leopard print stockings from last year, and I bought Ellie's this year at Target (only $10!) and had it monogrammed in the color and font to match mine.

 This corner will be the spot this year for our Christmas tree:

 I plan to switch out these photos in place of our recent Holiday photos, and add a bit more sparkle:

With just a few more additions our house will be fully decorated! I have been in the Christmas spirit way before I began decorating. I bought Michael Buble's Christmas CD and Ellie and I have been listening to that in the car since the beginning of November. Yep, that's right! It's been over a month and I will never tire of it! :) I've also been reading Ellie Christmas books since October. I am very excited for her to experience my favorite time of year!