It's beginning to look a lot like . . .

. . . Christmas!  Y’all thought I was going to say something smart@&$, didn’t you?!  Never fear, that will come below. 

Before I do my post today, I wanted to encourage you to check out my guest post on the blog "3 P's in a Pod" about Holiday Torture, I mean Travel, with kids. 

Today I had a healthy dose of holiday cheer and have improved my attitude.  I attended the National Charity League Holiday Home Tour as well as the California Center for the Arts Tree Lighting and rounded out the day with a trip to see the Knob Hill house in San Marcos.  Was definitely a family fun day, but, of course, it was the Trifecta, so there’s some entertaining lessons learned along the way: 

1)      When you decide to go on a holiday home tour, always leave yourself 3 hours and ALWAYS bring a friend.  You need someone there to witness the extravagance.  There is just no way to describe a house that has 19 trees, all that are decorated as if they were sitting in a Macy’s New York window.  I do NOT have that kind of creativity, but it really was fun to see the beautiful homes and get some ideas.  Plus, it was to benefit a good cause!

2)      When you mix Red and Green frosting, it becomes a sh*t brown color that I haven’t seen since we changed diapers.  One of the activities at the Center for the Arts was making cookies with all the frosting you could possibly put on them.  So, of course, the Id really took that one to heart.  She then proceeded to smear it all over her cookie and when she was done she said, “mommy, it’s brown, ewwwww!”  Of course, she still ate it because even brown frosting tastes good.

3)   Only children can turn works of art into a playground.  I'm certain these statutes at the Center were intended for children to climb on, I'm just not sure the artist would have envisioned little butts hanging out of them like this!

4)      When you decide to allow your husband to turn you into the drying tree for the children’s ornament project, make sure that it’s not for a project that involves glue and glitter.  My husband hung a craft ornament from my coat, and it wasn’t until later that I realized the Superego’s ornament lost an eyeball and almost all of its glitter as a result of rubbing against my coat.  D@mnit!!!

The inventor of glitter clearly was not a mother who had to clean it up. 
That stuff is the bane of any mother’s existence.

5)      When telling the baby to put on some boots, make sure that the boots actually fit her.  If you do not, she MAY end up wearing your husband’s gloves on her feet to keep them warm.  The Id put on some rain boots because we were going to be in the “snow”.  Unfortunately, I didn’t notice that she had on her sister’s boots rather than her own, and they of course were too big for her.  The consequence, her shoes fell off when she was sitting watching a show and my husband had to give her his gloves to keep her feet warm.

Recommendations for today . . . Although the holiday home tour and Center tree lighting are over and you can’t do them this holiday season, keep them in mind for next year - they were great, and the holiday home tour was $25 and the Center event was FREE!  Something you can still do is go and see the house that is on Knob Hill in San Marcos.  This was one of those classic decorated homes like the one in Albuquerque New Mexico that I still remember from when I was a kid.  You have no idea where they get all the decorations, much less how they store them 11 months out of the year, but they are absolutely fantastic and what Christmas memories are made of.