Adventures of the Loveless Family

The weekend before Christmas, we made a trip to Jersey Shore to visit Nana for Christmas. My parents were also planning to go, so mom and I decided to take advantage of the time together and do a baking marathon. We both brought our favorite recipes and lots of ingredients. We spent most of the day baking and had a great time together. Everyone got in on the fun!

Dad and Nana show off Dad's perfect pizzelles.

Scott teaching Molly to "tap, tap" to keep from dumping all the sprinkles on one cookie.

Mr. Kitty is our neighbor cat. The girls love him. When we first moved here, our neighbor warned us "Mr. Kitty is a grumpy kitty, be careful when you try to pet him." Over the past few years of living here, he's become less grumpy. When we come out front to go for a walk or to do sidewalk chalk, he often comes running to get petted by the girls for a few minutes.



Megan decided to draw Mr. Kitty on the sidewalk. She's turning into quite the artiste.

We decided to try out hands at taking our own Christmas photos this year. I am really happy with how they came out. Here are the ones we used on our card.

I had Scott take some of me with the girls, too. This was my favorite.

This was so not our typical Christmas tree experience. Normally, we go out to the tree farm and cut a tree a few weeks before Christmas. It's almost always too big and needs trimmed down a bit. This year, since we planned to head out of town on Christmas afternoon, we decided to get a "pretend" tree so we wouldn't come home to a dry, needly mess. We picked this teeny, tiny beauty up at Jo-Ann's for half off. It was barely 5 feet tall and really skinny.

Since it was already prelit and partially decorated with these pinecones and berries, we had to be pretty selective about what ornaments we chose to decorate it with. The girls and I had fun decorating and looking through all the ornaments to decide which ones to use.



Notice the large cluster of ornaments near the front. That got rearranged when the girls lost interest ;)

Megan put the star on top. We've had this star for all of our Christmases - I bought it the Christmas before we got married and we've used it every year.

Sweet Santa Molly.