The Perfect Tree, Etc

This pretty much sums up our tree-hunting experience from this past weekend...

The first place we tried was dangerously close to a busy highway which equals disaster when you have a 19-month old running in between very large Christmas trees that are only about 2 feet apart from each other. After seeing the prices (which were astronomical even compared to our old tree lot in Bham) and coming very close to having a panic attack after going about 5 minutes without being able to find Greer in the maze, we packed it up and headed to another place!

Ellie decided to cooperate for a quick picture, but by this point we had already dragged her brother to the car and locked him into his carseat!

Tree place #2 was much more pleasant. Greer still was not into cooperating for any kind of picture, but I was at least able to find our tree in 3 minutes flat, snap a few pics of the two of them, and get out of there!

All of my pictures turned out so nicely wouldn't you say???

The boy has to be the world's worst at cooperating for a picture.

Take a close look at the two of them together because this is probably the best you are going to get this year. Please do not think you didn't make the cut for a Christmas card from the Prewetts this year...there simply will not be one this year. There are several reasons for this decision that I will not go into. Quite frankly I'm just too exhausted to fight this little guy who has by the way been giving us a run for our money lately. He has turned into quite the HANDFULL! I will need lots of prayer to get through my days in the coming months if he stays this way!

Our sweet little tree made it home. I actually enjoyed having a smaller space which meant a smaller tree which meant half of my ornaments are still in the storage bin and won't be gotten out this year! Oh, and did I mention another lovely part of our Saturday? I spent over an hour tearing through boxes in our garage trying to find our stockings and stocking holders with no such luck. I keep waiting for them to appear but so far they haven't. I am trying not to think about it too much because I am close to shedding quite a few tears over this. I will say I was fortunate enough to find the "baby" box full of things that will be much needed come January as well as the blasted chip and dip bowl I have been looking for all football season, now that football season is OVER. Needless to say the boxes are all still thrown everywhere in the garage so we have been parking outside of the garage all week. Maybe we'll get the energy to stack them nice and neatly back up this weekend! No stockings, but we do have a tree.

Tonight was a very special night for Ellie! She had her "Winter Spectacular" at gymnastics. This was a time for parents, grandparents, aunts, uncles, etc to come out and see what all she has learned so far.

Uncle Josh and She She were sweet enough to come...

Greer again, so cooperative for the camera. He acts like I'm not even standing right in front of him calling his name!

I think the bars might be her favorite...

The little monkey just walks right up to the bar, pulls her self up, and flips over about 5 times in a row!

Then she showed off her moves on the beam. She did not fall off once...

She absolutely loves gymnastics!

Who wouldn't love bouncing across a 12-foot trampoline and soaring into a foam pit???

We were very proud of her, and she got lots of ribbons for each event. We'll see if her winter dance recital goes as well. We have that this weekend, and I am not so sure how she is going to handle big lights on a big stage!

I have one last thing to share that is totally unrelated to anything else on this post. If you have small children who love apples as much as mine and loathe cutting them up and peeling them, you have got to get one of these contraptions!

It is so easy to use that even Ellie can do it all by herself.

It cores, peels, and slices an apple in about 5 seconds flat. Talk about convenient!

Look how beautiful...perfect for little ones! I got this off of Amazon for $20. It is simply called the "Apple Peeler." I highly recommend it folks. Would make a great Christmas gift for someone I'm sure!

I hope to be able to post more frequently now. We switched our Internet service a few days ago, and my blogging is about 100 times easier! I went from waiting 10 minutes for 4 pictures to upload to about 1-2 minutes for 10 to upload! Hallelujah!