It’s the end of 2008, a pretty tough year by many measures (although the birth of Lucy was one of the few bright spots) - so why not start a new family tradition?
We thought we could make the Saturday before Christmas “Blue Tongue Day.”
So get out your Blueberry Lollipops and start celebrating:
Step 1) The youngest child shows her blue tongue:
Step 2) The oldest child shows her blue tongue:
Step 3) The youngest child hides her blue tongue (but still makes a devious face):
Step 4) The oldest child poses for a blue tongue close-up:
As the number of kids increases and the size of the apartment stays the same, the only place we have to cut is on Christmas tree size - so we went for one of those potted ones again, this time, only smaller. Considering we have about 300 ornaments, we probably don’t even need the tree since you almost can’t see it.
But Grace and Lucy love it - well…more accurately, they enjoy playing with the lights and ensuring that strands that worked five minutes earlier now need to have 5 or 6 bulbs replaced (while comforting Lucy since she more than likely received a face pinch):
Once the novelty of taking them out of the box wears off, Grace really does take the whole decorating thing quite seriously…
And Lucy gets into it too (and likes to further prove she’s her father’s daughter by making sure she sticks out her tongue whenever she’s concentrating):
I can’t really remember what happened but for some reason we had a wardrobe change before the girls engaged in a neck tug-of-war (which apparently is very funny) with the light strands:
Even funnier - shoving a light up your sister’s nose (or what we call the Rudolph-ification of Lucy):
Somehow, we do eventually make it to the ornament part - Grace likes to find one small area of the tree and place all of her ornaments in that spot (perhaps to focus the eye or something):
And no evening of decorating would be complete without the staged family pose (minus Jim since he’s taking all of the pictures). Now that Lucy is with us, we are used to doing two takes: 1) the family pose and 2) the family pose with hairpull.
