Christmas is coming, ready or not!

I can't believe Christmas is almost here...not sure why, but we definitely did not bring our A-game to the Christmas preparations for this year.  Maybe because we'll be in Atlanta visiting my family, or maybe because we're doing very limited gifts, or maybe just because we've been really busy between work, me trying to get in shape, and managing two terriers instead of one (which also puts some restrictions on the decorations because our house is a constant wrestling ring for the dogs).  

We got our tree within the first week of December, and after some debate and research, we ended up sticking with a real tree.  It's probably the best looking real tree we've had, but there's been a slight problem - it has not drunk hardly any water.  I mean, I've had to water it maybe once since we put it up.  Crazy.  But, the leaves aren't falling off too badly, and it only just started smelling kind of weird.  

And, we finally took our Christmas picture earlier this week, which means I'm super late getting Christmas cards out.  I thought about just doing Valentines Day cards or something, but it's fun to dress the dogs up for the Christmas card :)  This year, our card wasn't quite as creative as normal, but we don't have Brooks trained quite as well as Jefferson for the photo shoots - even though, in our family Christmas picture, Brooks looked at the camera every time, while the only picture Jefferson looked at the camera for turned out blurry.  I was hoping to do something funny with Santa and his new elf, so I found a elf-ish shirt for Brooks at Walmart.  The dogs HATE wearing clothes for the most part, so they usually do funny things like just stare at us spitefully and don't move until we take off their shirt.  Works ok for pictures though :)

Jefferson played dead when I put the elf shirt on him

This was Brooks' reaction to wearing the Santa outfit

Angry terriers

Family Christmas picture :)

Being good by the tree

 Coming down the chimney

PS - today, I am 30.  Doesn't feel any different, but I can definitely remember thinking 30 was old, and I've gotten some comments recently (when being carded) about wanting to look like me when they're 30.  That's nice but also makes me feel old.  It will be weird when I have to fill out something age-group related too.  I'm hoping this will be a great year and that God will have some good things in store for my 30s.