Bright Ideas

As many of you know, Christmas makes me happy. Very happy. There's just something exciting about getting the decorations all set up that puts me in a good mood. We decided to put the decorations up a little earlier than normal this year because I was going to be out of town for Thanksgiving weekend. We purposely didn't make any plans for the entire weekend so that we could take our time.

Little did we know that Miss Madelyn had formed her Mommy's same love for Christmas and all of its decorations! Once the boxes started coming out, she INSISTED that we put the tree up. Chris, not being able to say no, agreed. The plan was actually to put the tree up and then spend some time during the game on Sunday decorating it. Unfortunately, we forgot who is actually in charge around here. And there we were putting every. single. ornament on the tree.

It was actually quite adorable. I was tickled at how much she wanted to be involved this year. Last year she lasted for about 5 ornaments and then was bored. Not this year. She wanted to help put just about every ornament on the tree. :)

The weekend continued at pretty much the same pace. As we unpacked boxes, Madelyn would get excited and want to put it up NOW. As I was unpacking one box in particular, I pulled out some nesting snowmen boxes. I'm a bit obsessed with snowmen, and bought these boxes many years ago thinking they would be perfect gift boxes. About 6 years later I still have 8 of the 10 boxes left. I set them aside making a remark about why on Earth I have kept them for so long. I pulled the lid off the outermost box to show Madelyn that there were many boxes inside. She was impressed. :) I asked her what she thought we could do with them, and she said, quite simply, "Use some nails, Mommy." I stopped for a moment and then said, "What a great idea!"

And this is what we came up with....

Thanks Madelyn for your creative ideas! :)