Christmas Decorations

As soon as I got up this morning I put together everything in the crock pot to make Turkey Rice Soup using our leftover Thanksgiving turkey. After about 8 hours in the crock pot it was ready for dinner tonight. It tasted really good!

This morning Ryder and I went out to fax some stuff to Sylvania (will explain later in the post) and stop at Kohls to get some new pillows for the boys. While we were out Zak & Ben were supposed to get the tree set up and light put on it. I got a call from Ben while I was at Kohls saying I needed to stop at WalMart to buy new lights. Apparently, most of our lights were not working. Once I got there and priced everything out we decided to buy a new pre-lit tree since it was only a few dollars more than getting the lights. I got a 6.5 foot pre-lit with clear lights for $38. Once we got home from our errands Ben & I put up decorations and set up the tree while the boys played upstairs. After a while the boys came downstairs to help put up some stuff on the door handles and walls then it was lunch time. This afternoon we decorated the tree which the boys were extremely excited about! Before the boys could get to work I had to go through our huge Rubbermaid of ornaments to figure out what would go on the tree this year. We have so many ornaments that not all can go on every year. I always put the personalized and sentimental ones on and then go from there. Below are a bunch of pictures. I didn't post pictures of our personalized ornaments because that is what I did last year, but you can click here to see that post and the pictures.

Look at his facial expression

he was so excited!

This ornament is special to me because it

reminds me of my dad. Not sure exactly

why, but I remember it going on the tree

every year as a kid and playing with it.

After the tree was decorated it was time for dinner. As I said before, we all thought the soup was delicious! I wanted to post a few pictures of Robin with the boys because she is so good with them and they love her!

Now, I will explain the fax to Sylvania. A few weeks ago we discovered out Blu-Ray player which is built in to our TV was not working. It would play DVDs, but would not play the Blu-Rays which it did do in the past with no issues. While out shopping yesterday I picked up a Blu-Ray player, but then decided not to buy it since I had not talked about it with Ben ahead of time. Well, yesterday we tried to figure out what was wrong by looking through the manual. Nothing seemed to help so Ben called the customer service number. After being on the phone with them forever the end results came down to if we had the receipt we would be able to get a replacement (as long as it was still under warranty which it should be since we got it February 2010) or we could go to a local repair shop and pay to have it looked at and fixed. Unfortunately, we got rid of the receipt once we got home and knew the whole thing was working. Last night I decided to e-mail BJs Wholesale customer service to see if there was a way for them to look up and send us old receipts. They immediately wrote back saying if we provided certain information they could send us the purchase history. So I sent the info back and we received the purchase history. We called Sylvania back and they said to fax that to them and in 1-2 business days we would get a call letting us know if it is under warranty and go from there. We are really hoping ti will lead to us getting a replacement so we can play our Blu-Ray movies!