December so far...

It has been raining a lot the past couple of weeks, which means the kids get stuck going on errands with mom, or they need to get creative with their time at home.  It's been sweater weather which I love!  Low 70's, high 60's.  It feels like Christmas here.  

The kids enjoy wrestling together.  Betsy is finally holding her own!  Enough getting picked on.  (and yes, they are pretty much the same size now.):  

About every other day, Tristan gets into the costume drawer and dresses up.  He's pretty much the same thing every time; Spider/Super Man.  He tries to get Betsy involved and dress her up too.  This is what I've walked out to a couple of times:

We got our tree earlier in the month.  We kind of thought we were going to get a little one this year, and we came home with this beast.  Naturally, we had a little buyers remorse, but got over that fast and fell in love with our perfect tree.  I love decorating the tree.  This is our very first year using colored lights.  Mama likes.    

 So does Tristan.  He chose one little corner of the tree and hung everything there.  So helpful.  

My two boys posing by our tree:

Betsy girl is getting little curls over her ears.  I love it!  I hope they are here to stay!

Meet Fred.  He is our elf on the shelf and has been in our home since the first week of December.  He is keeping a good eye on our little ones and making sure they are being good this year.  Each night he flies back to Santa and gives him a full report.  Then he comes back to our home and finds a new place to camp out for the day, just to watch.  Tristan LOVES finding his new spot in the house each morning.  And he knows exactly why he is here.  One day when Tristan was being naughty and was crying really hard because he was getting into trouble, he ran over to Fred and cried, "Please!...don't go back and tell Santa!".  He was hysterical.  It was the saddest thing ever.  But hey, that's what Fred is here for,  to keep these kids in line. :)

 

All clean from a bath, and just cute.  Still, the happiest baby I've ever seen:

We did attend the Pipe Masters this year.  Was so much fun.  This actually deserves a post of it's own, so I'll post more pictures from this special day later.  

This was the worst Santa I have ever seen!  We were at a different mall from our own, and decided to just visit Santa while we were here and get it over with so we didn't have to fight the crowds at Ala Moana.  No one was in line, we walked right up.  Santa was kicking back with the elf photographers and a Mountain Dew.  They finally saw that we were waiting and took their positions, but no one cared to greet me or tell me what to do.  They didn't even look at me.  So I just slowly walked up with the kids, and told the photographers that we were taking our own photos.  They were fine with that, as long as we were behind the white fence.  Whatever.  That's fine.  I repeated it to Santa, just to fill him in, and he says, "Don't tell me, I'm just the mannequin".  Ok.  So I'm forcing the kids on his lap and waiting for Santa to get into character but he never did.  Didn't even care to talk to Tristan.  So I had to step in and say, "Tristan, don't you want to tell Santa what you want for Christmas??"  And Santa says really short, "What do you want?"  Tristan was not that impressed but Betsy got a kick out of the whole experience.  It was all pretty funny.  But I think we will try and take them to Ala Moana to make it up to Tristan.  It wasn't as magical as he expected.