Christmas Diaries Day 5&6: Preparations and Festivities

I thought I'd roll my whole weekend into one big post. It's been a great weekend, and I can't believe it's almost over already! Where has all the time gone??

Yesterday Luke and I stayed home all day just getting projects done. It was a pretty productive day. First of all I worked on my Christmas cards for my co-workers
Then my mom helped me figure out how to print my Christmas cards for everybody else. I can't show a picture, because I don't want to spoil the surprise for anyone who will receive one ;-)

Most of the day was spent painting the trim in the attic. We are almost totally done now, and ready for new carpet!! Yay! Here is a picture from when the walls were all painted and we had just applied primer to the trim. I really think I'm going to like it when it's done!To reward ourselves for our hard work, we ordered pizza and wings for dinner (yum!), and I then spent hours last night creating a photo book on Snapfish of our first year of marriage. My goal is to create one album every year. I stayed up until 1:00 AM working on it! It was just addicting. I could see myself totally breaking the bank on these when we have kids! I'll have to try and restrain myself. The one I plan on ordering was only about $28 for an 8"x8" custom photo book with 20 pages. I didn't think that was too bad! And I got to design every element of the entire book. It was pretty cool! I'm glad my mother-in-law enlightened me about Snapfish. The album is now done and ready to order...I guess it's a Christmas present to myself, LOL! I will definitely show pictures once I get it :-)

Moving on to today: day 6 of this wonderful month. Since we worked so hard yesterday, we took it pretty easy today. We decided to go on a festive Christmas date this evening :-)

We began the night at IHOP. Believe it or not, I had never eaten there before! (which helps me out with one of my lists too, as one of my goals is to eat at 5 restaurants where I have never eaten before). I had seen the commercial for their holiday hotcakes a few times, and had been dying to try the gingerbread one.
It was amazing! It was like eating a giant gingerbread cookie with whipped cream and sprinkles :-) I couldn't finish the whole thing, because it was even too sweet for me! It was great, though. I hope to try the eggnog one next time. Luke had chocolate chip pancakes, and the pancakes themselves were chocolate. I was slightly in awe :-)

After our pancake dinner, we headed to Tinseltown to see Disney's A Christmas Carol in 3D. I had never seen a 3D movie before, and was very surprised at how great the animation was, and how not lame the 3D was! :-P The movie was great. It was a little more intense than I was expecting! I could feel the tenstion in a few of the scense, and definitely would have been scared of it if I were little. I thought the whole thing was really well-done, and enjoyed every minute of it. I don't know if my husband would say the same. I had to give him a light kick during the Ghost of Christmas Present part because he had fallen asleep! I can't believe he paid $13 for a movie, and then slept through some of it :-P The movie is a must-see, though, especially in 3D!

That brings us to now. Now we are sitting in in front of our tree, trying to savor the last few hours of our weekend.

Be looking for posts this week on: Christmas shopping (we haven't even started!!!), Christmas cookies (I hope to spend the week and weekend planning and baking lots of Christmas treats), Christmas movies, and more.