The McGeary-Stella Family: Getting in the Spirit of the Season

We're ready for the Christmas Season to get into full swing here in the Stella household. This past week has been quite busy between work, car shopping, doctor appointments, physical therapy and sick little peanuts! But we've trucked right through and came out with Christmas all over the house! Tomorrow we head outside to light up the night with our bushes and trees!!

The Candy Apple Tree

We have our two Christmas trees up. One in the living room with all of our sentimental and "regular" ornaments. Then another in our entryway that I like to call our Candy Apple tree. It is covered in real and plastic candy canes and miniature apples, as well. I love it! I love that we have two trees this year and Nicholas is really enjoying this explosion of Christmastime all over!!

With Christmas expanding all over the house we were "forced" to break out the fun pen. They no longer make play pens like they had when we were kids so we've had to improvise, slightly. When Nicholas got really mobile we wanted to make sure that we kept him safe and we bought a plastic "pen" with walls that have toys attached to them. He loved it and didn't even realize he was being contained. We've broken it out once again, now that Addison is mobile and the Christmas trees are up. The kids LOVE the fun pen and have been playing in it together each day. Nicholas actually gets upset when we put Addie to bed because he doesn't have a playmate his own size anymore. Daddy makes up for that with some wrestling and football!!

Tonight we decided to head into Sparta, a local town by us, for the Annual German Christmas Market on the Lake Mohawk Boardwalk. While it was really quite cold, it was really nice to walk the boardwalk and see all of the Christmas vendors and smell all of the yummy German desserts and food that was being cooked up. Everyone was nice and bundled up but the cold still hit pretty hard so we walked the boardwalk a bit, bought Nicholas a mini tractor and Daddy a pie and then headed home. It was well worth the ride and 35 minute wait for a parking spot. We'll definitely be back next year!!