it's the most wonderful time of the year!

friday night taylor called to see if she and brian could borrow tanner on saturday. some friends of theirs from brian's office throw a big christmas party every year geared for kiddos. they thought it'd be much more fun with a kid, so they needed tanner to go along. 

sure thing...as long as you take pictures! 

so tanner met santa for the first time...

and

loved

him... 

 watching santa

 eating uncle brian's sweatshirt...with lights-lots of entertainment!

he even got to bring home a super cute party favor...

and in other news, we are slowly but surely recovering from our christmas tree mishap. unfortunately the home depot lance went to didn't have any "good" ones. so they checked and said the other home depot close to us had the one tree he wanted in stock...actually they had 11! so super husband headed to home depot #2. what home depot #1 failed to mention was that home depot #2 closed at 9 pm (remember he left the house at 9...home depot #1 didn't close until 10)...so clearly home depot #2 was closed. um why does the same store close at different times?!?!

so the next day tanner and i ventured out to get a tree. yup, having an 11 month old helping you pick your tree changes things. last time we bought a tree i remember dragging lance to every store that sold them to make sure we saw all our options-we needed the prettiest tree for the best price! haha! not so much this time. we went to garden ridge (yes, only one store), saw 3 trees that were approximately the right height, quickly ruled out the one that was $200+ (um that's a little crazy to me), and decided either of the other two would be just fine-whichever one i could find first among all the boxes and boxes of trees was the one we were taking home.

got home, pulled it out of the box and got it put up and plugged in (yes all the lights worked)! then tanner decided he wasn't really interested in helping put up the tree and really just wanted to be held. so our tree sat in our living room totally unfluffed and looking kinda sad for a week.

but sunday we made a little more progress-tree was fluffed and decorated! i did discover that our tree topper doesn't really like our new tree. it refuses to cooperate-it was super floppy and crooked and fell of twice. so it's been retired. once i get some ribbon and make a bow to go on top, the tree will be officially finished.

tanner's first ornaments...courtesy of grammy. growing up we got a new ornament each year, so grammy decided tanner needed this tradition started too!

and even a few presents wrapped for underneath the tree