Lulu & Us: Our {Long} Weekend

I hope you all had a wonderful few days enjoying time with family, friends and good food! We are officially ready to kick off the Christmas season in our household with the tree fully decked and decorations around the house (except really only in the living room and entryway). This post is coming to you from the comfort of Parker's anywhere chair next to our tree in our living room that smells like a pine forest. Pure heaven. The past few days seem like such a blur to me but the highlights include:

1. Successfully baking a pumpkin pie from scratch. Although, I was a slave to the pie dough for a couple hours, the final product was well worth it. I'm not joking when I say that I felt like I was being bullied by the pie crust process. I even had my expert baker of a mother come down for mental support.

2. Thanksgiving! We've sort of fell into a tradition last year when we took our time waking up, made a breakfast casserole which we ate while lounging around watching the parade. Such was the story this year, and after we played with Parker for a while and she eventually went down for a nap. That's when we started getting around for an evening of family and friends. Parker woke up from her nap around 3 and we were off! First stop was to Matt's aunts house, followed by round two of dinner up at my parent's. My grandparents were able to make it to dinner, which always makes me so happy. Parker has been fascinated by my grandfather, Doc since she was a couple months old so it brought tears to my eyes when she walked right up to him, put her little hand on his and said 'Hi, Doc' with a sweet little smile. Probably my favorite moment of this Thanksgiving.

The rest of the weekend was spent decking our halls and the premier of our Elf on the Shelf. We are totally embracing this stage because Parker can grasp the concept of Elf on the Shelf, but at the same time, it doesn't take much to impress her. So far we've placed the elf (whom Parker quickly named Cassie) in her 'potty treat' bowl and hanging from the fan in our living room. Both days she was floored. The best part was probably hearing the things she would say to it. It was a lot of 'I went peepee on the potty, ELF!' and 'What you doing, ELF?!'. Always pronounced with an emphasis on 'ELF'.

We also got our tree on Saturday and had it completely decorated before sundown. It took us only a few minutes in the tree nursery before it was packed up onto the top of our car, making it's way into our home. It's definitely the prettiest tree we've had yet and we made a few last minute ornament purchases that made a HUGE impact on the appearance.