This evening we decided to clear out the living room and set up our Christmas tree and holiday decorations. In all the process took a little over an hour, which is pretty good, but since I figured you wouldn’t want to see the whole hour’s worth of setup, I set the camera to take a photo every 20 seconds so that you could enjoy the time lapse.

I get a pretty good kick out of watching the dozen things that Asher gets into over the course of the setup.

Each year it seems that we are getting more and more festive. It used to be that since we travel every Christmas that I would grumble about even putting up a Christmas tree, because what’s the point if you’re not even going to be home on Christmas Day? Now, it seems that we’re really starting to get into the spirit, and have begun decorating the house the weekend after Thanksgiving so that we can enjoy the holiday all month long.

This year we took the outdoor lighting up a few steps by adding lights to the trees and the roofline above the garage. Because most of strings of lights are all connected, I’m struggling to decide which scenario would be worst: the house burning down from an overloaded circuit, or one bulb burning out and the entire display going out because of it.

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For Thanksgiving this year we hadn’t really planned on doing a whole lot until Tiffani called us and invited us down to Houston to join her family for dinner. Oddly enough, that same day, Brigham called Tiffani to invite them up to Austin for the same reason. Finally, we all agreed that we would meet up at Brig’s for what turned out to be an excellent Thanksgiving Day.

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After dinner, we had fun watching UT beat A&M while the kids played with Brig’s new electric car track.

Because Stake Conference doesn’t start until this afternoon and Jill could use some quiet time, Asher and I headed down to the ponds at Texas State to feed the ducks the better part of a stale loaf of bread.

The ducks were surprisingly cooperative considering the large chunks of bread that Asher insisted upon throwing at the heads, but the true surprise of the morning was that I had intended on taking more photos of Asher when in fact a few people came up and started taking pictures of the both of us!

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Afterward, Asher and I still had a little time to burn so we took a stroll around campus and its many flights of stairs.

Aaron and Katrina Lawyer are our good friends that we met while we still lived in Austin. Sadly, around the same time we moved to the south side of Austin (Kyle) they moved to the north side of Austin (Round Rock). While we only get to see each other every once in a while, we recently got together to take Aaron and Katrina’s Christmas card photos down at Texas State.

Everything was going well until Asher started yelling ’It hurts! It hurts!’ At this point, Jill realized that he was covered head to toe in fire ants. For those not familiar with Texas’ fire ants, they are some of the most painful bites you can have. So we quickly stripped off his clothes, packed up the car and headed home to find some hydrocortisone.

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But, it seems, we did manage to get a couple of nice shots of the Lawyers.

November has rolled around again and the days have shortened and the temperatures have dropped. The only downside to all of this is that it’s getting tougher for me to get home before the sun has set, making it difficult to play in the back yard with Asher.

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So here are our last few evenings out in the backyard while there’s still light out.