Every year, I think I’ll wait until November to start listening to Christmas music, making plans for the holiday, all that jazz. And yet I can never even make it through September before plunking “Bing Crosby” in my iTunes search bar & spending several days a week dreaming of a Winter Wonderland. So it only seems appropriate that other small odes to the coming holiday should follow 🙂

The first of these comes in the form of a bar of soap. Not just any soap mind you. Christmas tree soap. And unlike the bottles of packaged pretties in the local Bath & Body works, this handmade variety from a lady named Susan in Texas contains no artificial fragrances, chemicals, or anything likely to cause cancer. But boy does it smell like a Christmas tree. We tried grating it & making liquid soap (cuz I’m picky about my forms of soap like that), which turned out better on our second attempt than the first, but I’ll try it another time or two before sharing the recipe, just to be sure it’s perfect. If you like bar soap though, you’re all set 🙂

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When I was little my dad would let my siblings & I get colored light strands to decorate our bedrooms for Christmas. He’d staple gun them around the trim or on the ceiling in the shape of a star. It was so exciting to go to our bedrooms at night & turn on the Christmas lights & fall asleep, feeling like our rooms had a little extra Christmas magic coming from the lights friendly glow. This year I came across a photo on Pinterest that reminded me of how much fun that was, so last week at Target we picked up a pack of white icicle lights & ta-da! Magical glowing Christmasy bedroom 🙂 Kaden loves it – he calls them “mehnah” (Christmas in Kaden talk) & it’s makes our room so inviting we’ve gotten in the habit of taking our favorite books to read in the bed just so we can spend more time under the glowing lights 🙂

Bella likes the lights too 🙂

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Here are a few more photos to leave you with this week:

We got a camera remote, which is completely awesome! Kaden took this pic himself (see the remote in his hand?) The above one reading in bed was taken with the remote too!

Remember how K likes to smell candles? Well sometimes he gets a little sooty :-/

My parents moved into a new house last week, which happens to have 2 lovely porches. And every porch ought to have a rocking chair. This is right after Kaden “helped” assemble theirs.

This one pretty much speaks for itself. You just never know what you may find when you’re moving.

And finally, I’m working on #5 on my list, learning Photoshop! This blog is doing “31 days to learning Photoshop for bloggers” & it’s been really fun so far. I like actions.

Hope you have a wonderful week!