Oh Christmas Tree

My mom made all of her grandbabies Christmas countdowns. It's a little box filled with cards with the number of days until Christmas and a little activity for that day. Stella's too little to know what's going on, but I'm having fun doing the activities with her anyway!

Our countdown box

 So far we've listened to Christmas music, watch a Christmas movie while eating popcorn, and decorated our tree. The first day we were suppose to make a bird feeder, but we skipped that for this year, and today we're suppose to write a letter to Santa. We'll probably skip that one too.

Because we've never really had room for a tree, for the past 2 years we've had a little 15 inch one that we'd set on the bookshelf. This year since we have a little more room, and we have our little Love Bean, we decided we needed to get something a little bigger. So after church yesterday, we made a Target run and bought a 4 foot tall pre-lit tree, ornaments, garland and ribbon for wrapping presents! 

Our floor lamp was taller than our tree, so we had to improvise. We covered a diaper box with some lace and set our tree on top of that. Then hubs and I hung the ornaments together. We bought bright, metallic, and glittery ornaments.

Every year I choose a theme for our gift wrapping. Last year it was golds and blues. This year, I knew that I wanted to use newspaper as the wrapping and then add big cool bows and lots of ribbon. I had so much fun wrapping, it's probably my favorite part of getting ready for Christmas. I still have some more to wrap, but I'm waiting for the mailman to deliver them.

Stella 2 Months

Our little Love Bean will be 2 months old on Sunday! Each month (until she's a year old) I'll be taking a picture of her in our orange chair.

Watch her grow: 1 month

Family Tradition

A couple of weeks ago, I told hubs that I wanted us to start some of our own family traditions now that we have the Love Bean. On Sunday, I came up with an idea that I love! Hubs says it's a good idea, but truthfully I think he's kind of indifferent about the whole idea. Anyway...the first family tradition the Krenz's will be starting will be...12 Days of Christmas, 12 Random Acts of Kindness.

Each day, for the 12 days leading up to Christmas, we will be doing one random act of kindness. What I love about starting this tradition is imagining how much fun Love Bean will have once she's old enough to comprehend what we're doing! Kindness and generosity are two character traits that I want to instill in her from a young age. When the time comes, I'll post our RAOKs each day (or at least every couple days).

Stella 1 Month

Our little Love Bean is 1 month old already! Each month (until she's a year old) I'll be taking a picture of her in our orange chair.

Stella's 1st Trip To The Mitten

The Love Bean and I made our first trip to Michigan. She did so good in the car on the way up. The way back to Chicago, was a little different. It wasn't horrible, but we did have to make a couple extra stops, which added about an hour to our travel time.

It was such a good trip. Stella got to meet her Auntie Mal, Uncle Jesse, Uncle Owen, her cousin Raelin, and some of her Great Grandparents, all for the first time! And I got to meet my new nephew Gatlyn!! He was born at 28 weeks, but is such a fighter.

Stella's Poppy (my dad) took her for her first combine ride. I think she liked it, even though she slept most of the time. And I'm pretty sure her Poppy loved it! I'm sure she'll be begging me to ride with him again when we're up there for Halloween ;)

Family Traditions

So, I was thinking the other day, it's only the first month of the year and I've already totally failed my new years resolutions. Maybe that's why I never used to have them...generally I'm a very goal oriented person, so it's strange to me how bad I am keeping my resolutions. So bad that, I've decided just to give up on the sending birthday cards one, since in the month of January alone I missed half of the birthdays in my family. My first resolution, having a quiet time with God everyday, was going really well, until I got sick. But I'm going to get back to it.

The last couple weeks have been really strange for me, and the stuff going on in my life has had me really distracted. I've had a hard time keeping up with my blog, but that will change. I will stay on top it.

This morning I was going through my Google Reader (where I read all the blogs I follow, so that I don't have to go to every page, unless I want to) anyway I read this post, and it reminded me of some family traditions we had growing up, that I hope to continue.

• Birthday dinners - growing up we got to pick whatever we wanted mom to fix for dinner. It didn't matter if anyone else liked it or not. 
• Coloring Easter eggs - while most families color eggs for Easter, I don't know of too many parents (except mine) that require you to answer a trivia question about events leading up to, during and after the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus
• Decorating the Christmas tree as a family 
• Fend for yourself Sunday dinners - we always had a big family lunch after church on Sunday, so Sunday night we got to eat whatever we could fix ourselves, even if it was a big bowl of ice cream, popcorn or some other junk food