Taking Down Christmas

I wish I was kidding.

We had friends over for the Superbowl, which meant I spent Saturday cleaning house, which finally gave me the motivation I needed to put away Christmas. Most of the cleaning involved wrapping and storing ornaments and shoving fake branches into my Christmas tree bin. Thankfully, I only had one run in with a spider and it was relatively small.

Here's our awesome tree. It looked a lot prettier decorated, but I love this tree:

I also had to put away the hand carved nativity set my dad bought in Israel. He bought one for each kid while on TDY back when I was about 8 years old and living in Florida. It's really cool to think that it's traveled and been in storage for about 17 years and comes out of its box looking so good (unfortunately, the stable broke, but it's fixable if I buy a wood clamp). It's gorgeous:

Michael was as helpful as a baby can be, which is to say that he cried and got in the way the whole time. He also didn't appreciate it when I tried to make him wear his santa hat:

No fun at all. At least, not until he "crawled" over to me, climbed up my sweater, and started laughing:

Which takes me to our little King of Cruising. Michael can pull himself up to standing all on his own and likes to make his way up and down the coffee table:

It's amazing how much he loves playing with his walker even when he's not sitting in it:

First stage of babyproofing our house, baby gate at the top of the stairs. It's the perfect height for our boy to stand next to, plus it has such fun textures for him to play with. That's why we got it, little boy, purely for your entertainment:

It's insane that he was just starting to push himself into a sitting position a few weeks ago. It probably won't be long before this kid is walking.

Last but not least, here's Michael's impression of his daddy: