Christmas tree compromises

Lydia and I have come to a few compromises regarding the Christmas tree. She still loves to re-decorate the branches. My love for finding ornaments strewn all over the apartment is waning. Time for compromise #1: I find the ornament, I re-hang the ornament. My height. She finds the ornament, she can re-hang the ornament. Guess who finds more ornaments?

The result?


....a very densely decorated Christmas tree. At least the top part is - the bottom section just gets emptier and emptier. (Funny comment from Julianna the other day: "Our Christmas tree just gets prettier and prettier!" I laughed, because in my opinion the lop-sided ornament placement does not make for a pretty tree. Functional, yes. Pretty, not so much.)

Lydia also can't get enough of cute little presents under the tree. She's not very gentle though, and the paper gets ripped time and again. I can't re-tape every gift 17 million times between now and Christmas Day. Which led us to compromise #2: I put all but one present in a cupboard that Lydia can't get into. The one remaining present? A large gift for the girls. They LOVE to play with it. And, yes, I re-tape it. But at least I am just re-taping one present! Matt and I even considered wrapping the entire box in a layer of packing tape. Another advantage? The box is too big for Lydia to move - she tries to pick it up and says "heavy heavy" but she can't drag it more than a few feet from our tree. Perfect.


Julianna loves the big gift too. In fact, if you walk in our front door between now and Christmas Day, I'd bet there's a 99% chance she'd introduce you to the big box. "Come look at our big present. It's for me and for Lydia."

What's in the box? Well, you'll have to wait for Christmas Day photos to find out!