Fun family traditions? Uh. Seems like anytime we try to plan something fun as a family it ends up being a ridiculous stressful event full of whining and irritated huffing and puffing.
Today for example. We planned to get our Christmas tree A real one this year. I also planned to meet a lady at meijer at noon to buy a movie. I told Ryan this at like 10 am. Amelia laid down for a nap and at 1130 I decides to wake her up and asked Ry to get the boys coats, shoes and hats on and pack some cheese and crackers while I got Amelia dressed.
Well he had to get himself dressed. And then mentioned he needed to dump garbage out of the truck (he takes our garbage to his work to dump). Then the truck was in the back yard (which is gated), so we had to move the van to get the truck out. The carseats weren’t even in the truck. The chainsaw wasn’t in the truck. Porter was whining and getting pissed because his shoes didn’t “feel right”. Hudson was getting pissed because he couldn’t get his mitten on right. Amelia was pissed because she wanted a bottle. I was pissed because we only had 10 minutes to get across town to meet this lady. Ughhh. I was ready to call it quits and just dig out the fake tree yet again.
But… we made it work. I called the lady, we got the carseats in the truck, the kids loaded up and we made it only 15 minutes late. Sure, we were all silent and brooding on the trip out there but once we got to the tree farm (which is a friends’ parents tree farm, and was closed so we had the run of the place) our spirits lifted. The boys were really excited about our new adventure.
The pickins’ were kind of slim for a smaller tree. These trees were HUGE! We walked all the way down the path and back and contemplated and discussed and compared and pondered. Ryan’s theory was “We just need to find one that has a good ‘body’ and we can trim it into a good shape once we’re home” Ok. Remember this, right?
So we find a few trees that are far too tall. One would work if we hacked the top off (it was kind of narrower in the middle toward the top) and others seemed like they’d work if we hacked about 4 feet off the bottom and trimmed the sides up a ton. We finally settled on one that seemed pretty close to what we needed. It was a little fuller than we’d liked but we figured we can trim it up, right?
We took a few pictures… my hubby is the best- he carried this huge wooden uh, thing, over so I could set my camera up and use the self timer. We packed the tree up, and headed home.
Here’s where the fun begins… are you ready for some laughs?? When we finally got around to bringing the tree in it was dark. Ryan went outside and when he brought the tree in the first thing I thought was “WOAH… way too big.” We obviously either overestimated the size of our house or underestimated the size of that tree. The second thought? “What the hell happened to the top of the tree and why is there so much trunk showing?!” (Ryan says “I only trimmed a little off the top!) I am pretty sure this is why he said to me “I”m going to run up to Menards for garbage bags… and look at their trees.” I shot the idea down. NO! We went and picked out our tree and we’re going to make it work! Little did I know he’d hacked a hunk of the top off of it! HAAH!
So out to the front yard we went with a hedge trimmer and chainsaw. Ry cut off some of teh trunk (and I’m pretty sure more of the branches at the bottom because we needed to cut MORE trunk off later), and I went to town with the hedge trimmers trying to shape the tree into a recognizable triangle shape. The neighbor came by to get his dog (who ran into our yard) and said “That’s unique… cutting the top of the tree off instead of the bottom! Shows you don’t follow the crowd, huh?” HAHAHA!
After oh, an hour?? Who knows… and many many laughs, we finally got our tree looking decent. Oh my word. Ryan kept saying we should just go buy another tree and I refused. No. This was OUR ugly tree and it is going to be a great memory. Ugly or not, it’s staying.
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nicolebarczak.com 
Bahahahhahahahhaaaaaa!!! Too funny. I'm sure it will look great once its decorated 😉
i love how it looks like you ended up with literally half of the tree 🙂 so funny. ryan is a trooper, my husband would have been SO crabby.
Sounds like one of our adventures. *lol!*You have a beautiful family and a beautiful tree to go with.You've captures some wonderful memories….beautifuly.Merry Christmas to you all.