Christmas lights

Today we put up our outside Christmas lights.  It was a chilly 40-something degrees and very blustery.  But the girls still came out with me to play while I worked on the lights.  They played with a ball, ran on the porch and in the yard, and they also drew on the porch with (according to Anna) "sidewalk chalkolate." Cara didn't last as long as Anna did outside - it was too cold.

There's something about Christmas lights that just makes you feel good.  Mom just emailed me, in fact, reminiscing about our Thanksgiving tradition of our big dinner, followed by decorating our Christmas tree. That was always a fun time, and we'd pull out the little ornaments we made when we were very little, or little ornaments with our handprints, and put them on the tree. Then we'd all lie beneath the tree and watch the lights blink. It was so disappointing when I learned that our tree wasn't as big as I remembered it being when I was little.

But anyway, Anna loves the lights. They're all net lights, which don't look great in the day if you're really looking, but they look really nice at light.  Our lights consist of three bushes at the left, center, and right of the house draped in blue lights, trimmed on the ground by white lights. After it got dark, we took them outside and put the girls in front of the bushes, then I flipped the switch, to two little gasps of amazement. Anna wanted to just look at and run around the lights until she got too cold again.  She's already looking forward to putting up the Christmas tree so she can play underneath it.  Maybe we'll do that tomorrow.  Hopefully we'll survive the season with Cara's curious fingers and a tree full of fun things to touch!