The Billmeier Family: Christmas 2011 Chapter 1: Christmas Decorating

I am so overwhelmed by the number of photos we have from Christmas! We seriously have well over 1000 photos...we obviously had LOTS of fun and made lots of wonderful memories with family and friends. I decided I'm going to have to break this up into "chapters" to even be able to tackle this. I'm completely skipping my November post in an effort to get Christmas up before the end of January. Hopefully I'll get back to it because there are some fun experiences to share with you!

Our Christmas season kicked off with decorating our own tree the day after Thanksgiving. Rebekah wasn't sure what we were doing, but once we started she caught on and wanted to copy what we did (this is a frequent occurrence in our house these days). Our tree had all of our nice ornaments on top, a blank area, then a bottom area with "Rebekah-friendly" ornaments. We had to leave the blank area because we didn't want things too high but within her reach for fear of the tree tumbling down while she was trying to grab for something!

She really loved having her own area of the tree. The ornaments were frequently taken off and put back on each day - but her way of "putting them back on" meant throwing them on the branch however they landed. It really looked like a battlefield of facedown snowmen and sideways santas. Totally fitting for a tree in a house with a 16 month old!
Helping with the tree topper

Rebekah's decorating skills

Finished product

Rebekah also quickly learned how to say "Santa," and practiced lots throughout the Christmas season! It originally sounded very similar to "dada," but eventually had its own sound!
click image for video

We also went to Grammy and Grampy's that weekend (Adam's parents). Rebekah helped Grammy decorate the tree while Adam and I went for a long half marathon training run.

Adam also helped his dad with outside lights while we watched.

Then we took a trip to downtown Grapevine to check out their decorations! A cold front had come in that day, so we didn't spend as much time there as we would have liked, but it was still fun!