One stocking short

Wow!  It's December!  I can't believe how quickly time has been going by lately. We set the bar low for decorating, but then it was feeling a little sad around here so we decided to haul up the Christmas bins from the basement after all.  

Speaking of Christmas spirit, this past weekend was Merry Millheim, a holiday celebration in a little town about 30 minutes from State College.  We figured this could be our big outing for the week so we loaded everyone up and Auntie Jess followed us out there.  As always it was nice to get out of the house and to see friends.  We used our friends' catering kitchen as our launching zone, which let us get everyone out of the car seats and into carriers inside where it was nice and warm. When we walked in our friends with 5 month old twins & toddler were there and kiddos seemed to come pouring into the kitchen, turning it into baby & toddler central!  At one point I think there were eight infants and five toddlers!  Someone who was browsing the craft market popped in, saw all the babies and said "so this is where you come to buy a baby, huh?" :) Some of this "baby central" action was caught on camera as you can see. 

After the initial craziness, we went over to the Elk Creek Cafe for some lunch with friends and their 3 year old and baby who's a month older than our babies. Four out of five adults at the table had a baby in their arms!  We accomplished a couple of firsts at the cafe--first truly public breastfeeding and first diaper changes in a public bathroom!  I'm happy to report that both things went pretty well!  

On the way home we swung into the tree farm where we got our tree last year. The idea was to just grab a pre-cut tree, tie it on, and go. But the pre-cut trees were all a little too big and expensive.  So Jess and I went on a mission to quickly cut one down and sent Michelle off to drive around for ten minutes to keep the babies relaxed.  So Jess and I tromped through the snow (my toes we're freezing in my tennies) to find our tree. We were pretty fast but it took the tree farm guy a while to tie it on and Michelle and I had to team up to keep pacifiers in to keep everyone reasonably quiet until the car was moving again!

We only have 10-15 minutes at a time to put up decorations so it takes a little longer than usual! (and even longer to write about it!) eventually we got the tree up and decorated. 

   Isaiah "helping" decorate the tree

As we were hanging up decorations we realized that we only have four stockings!  We love our knit stockings we bought years ago, but there's a slight problem! We only planned to have two kiddos so we only bought four stockings!  Oops!  I hung them anyway and told the babies that whoever sleeps the best gets to have a stocking! :) I know I'm probably damaging their little psyches with this joke but I've gotten a kick out of reminding the babies what's at stake before a nap and asking the best sleepers which stocking they want afterwards.  But really, we have been searching Etsy for new stockings and finally found some we liked that were a reasonable price so hopefully we'll get those soon.