Decking the halls

I just wanted to spend a few minutes talking about our evening last night. First, you must know that we bought our LIVE Christmas tree last Monday. This was 2 days late according to my holiday plan [side note – a holiday is plan is what I think we should accomplish during a holiday. Rocky doesn’t really accept it is a plan but rather as a wish list…and he also says wish in one hand and poop in the other and tell him which one fills up first.] And every day since, it has sat dark and lonely in our family room. Although I desperately wanted to put lights on it, with diapers, dinners and dusting…who had time? So I arrived home last night on a mission…to put lights on the tree, even if it killed me. And boy did I about get my wish.


During dinner, I announce my plan to Rocky. Being the loving supportive husband that he is, he grabbed the twins and wrangled them into the family room. Charlie was pretty easy to corral considering it was related to Christmas. My job was to make sure the lights worked before I handed them to Rocky. Rocky’s job was to put the lights on the tree. And considering I get ridiculed every year for wrapping each and every limb with the optimal number of lights from top to bottom so that our tree can land small aircraft, I honestly didn’t care one bit how he got the job done. 100 or 1000 lights, it didn’t matter to me.

The first 2 strands came on and went on without a hitch. But sets 3 and 4 had major issues with half the strands not lighting up. So we decided that Charlie and I would go out to the storage building and look for more lights. [Side note – Rocky does not prefer to enter the storage building due to the amount of, ahem, stuff that I keep in it. That’s how bad it is]. So flashlights in hand, we headed out for lights. Since I had looked around the bins just a couple of weeks ago, I immediately knew where to find them. So bin #1 was brought in. We ended up going back for garland and some ornaments because A-the weather was so nice and B-I’m an overachiever. So again, we quickly found and brought in what we needed. And before you knew it, we had 4 bins and they actually contained plenty of things to decorate our tree and our house.

When we came in, we found Rocky taking a bio break and the twins playing freely in the bedroom next door (it happens, more often than we would like). Thank goodness for child proof outlets and ruggedized alarm clocks. [Side note – having the mattress and box springs on the floor is actually a benefit in times like this. So delay bringing the bed frame back in]. Otherwise we’d never get bio breaks. So I grabbed the twins and we headed back to the family room.

I grabbed a couple more sets of light out of a bin and tested them. They worked! I looked around the room, made some piles of toys, turned the TV on to the toddler channel, and made sure the corral was set up. We were good to go . As I was going counterclockwise around the tree, not so strategically spacing and inserting lights, I kept running into Charlie, who was running clockwise around the tree. So I stopped to sit him outside of the corral and in front of the TV so that I didn’t accidentally hurt him.

Then I started back. Suddenly the strand in my hand went dark. Every tree decorator’s nightmare. But much to my shagrin, I found William has reached through the corral and he was pulling the drop cord out of the outlet. So I stopped to extend the corral and to put William in front of the TV.

Then I started back again. I noticed Anna standing over in the corner like she was hiding something. I walked over and found that she had a mouth full of pine needles. So I once again stopped, cleaned out her mouth, and sat her in front of the TV.

Then I started back again…only to run into Charlie again while watch the lights go out once more. So I decided that the kids had no interest in seeing that I put lights on the Christmas tree so I put everything down and we had a WWE style wrestling match .

Once the kids went to bed, I finished putting the lights on while Rocky cleaned the table and did the dishes. I even managed to put a silver star on top and drape it with red and silver garland. But as beautiful as it looks…I can’t let it end there. So tonight I think we’ll brave the odds and try to put some shiny pretty hand sized ornaments on.

I love my family! I’m just sayin’.