(Cont.)

Anna is still very much enamored of her furrowed brow.

Watching Sesame Street.

Cat-stalking.

Composing her Christmas list.

Anyway, I've been so busy documenting her permanent scowl that I've pretty much failed to do any cooking since Thanksgiving. Don't worry though, there's kale in the fridge, ready to go. Fortunately I had Bunko at Emily's last week, where I put together this extremely festive plate:

I think this was actually my third extremely festive plate.

We got our first real Christmas tree yesterday! And by real I mean really REAL because my husband is a hippie and wouldn't let me get a nice big easy fake tree like I wanted. Instead we got an actual live tree in a pot, because that seemed like the most difficult possible option.

Anna oversees its transport with the standard enthusiasm.

For someone who has never decorated her own tree before I have a pretty extensive collection of ornaments, dating back to some I got as a kid. What I didn't realize until yesterday was that some of these long-dormant ornaments are really freaking creepy.

My theory is that this is dramatic chipmunk going incognito.

One of the downsides of our inconvenient new tree is that unlike the soft plasticky goodness of fake trees, it boasts a shield of deranged killer spikes that make decoration an extremely uncomfortable experience. After about twenty minutes of "reach in, try to hook something on, whimper pitifully" I realized that because this tree is alive, it maintains all of its natural defenses. Particularly the defense against people hanging a bunch of weird-looking crap on it.

Update: Dan really wants me to link the word "incognito" to this video, I guess because he thinks the world needs to know that all of my vocabulary is Sesame Street-derived. I was trying to keep that on the DL, man!