Since we had some extra kids here for the holiday weekend, we decided it would be a good time to go cut a Christmas tree. Actually, this was my only goal for the weekend. I wanted to get the tree decorated while the college boys and DDIL#4 were here. The thought of decorating the tree with just The Girl made me a little sad. So we headed out, going in the opposite direction than we have done in previous years. It is closer to our house and we thought we'd be out and back in just a couple of hours. Um, no.

It was a beautiful day and we outfitted ourselves in the most stylish winter wear we could find.

We found a great tree, but realized that getting it down the hill and into the truck was a little problematic since it was in the middle of a patch of dead aspen trees. We had to push a couple of the dead trees down so we could drag the tree though.

The cutting began and then stopped because the chain came off the chainsaw. Luckily, we had the little tool we needed to tighten it back on.


The men huffed and puffed and, with the aid of gravity, managed to man-handle it into the back of the truck, where we had to tie it in.

The bed of the truck is 8 feet long. You can see that we had more tree sticking out the back of the truck than we had inside the bed of the truck. Without tying it in, it had a tendency to want to teeter-totter on the tailgate.This is where we stopped and had some tasty hamburgers for lunch.
What DH and I learned on this adventure, is that we have an inflated sense of how tall our living room ceiling actually is, because when we got it home, we had to cut another 6 feet off it to get it in the house. So the chain saw came out again. Finally we got it into the tree stand in the driveway and then hefted it into the house....no small feat, since LS Boy had a migraine and was moaning upstairs. We stood it up in the corner of the living room and started tweaking its position.....and the tree stand broke. Seriously??

I was beginning to doubt whether or not we were ever going to get this thing done. The tree stand had a spike in the center of it that went up into the trunk of the tree to hold it in place and that was what broke. We had to cut off another section of trunk to insert another tree stand. (We have several saved from years past....luckily.) DH thought he could spread a tarp under the tree trunk and saw it off in the living room, since no one was very anxious to drag it outside and then back in again. So the chainsaw came out in the middle of my living room. We got the new tree stand attached, but the house smelled like chain saw exhaust for the rest of the day, even after opening the doors and windows for an hour.
Still with me?
We got going on the decorating. While DH and the kids strung the lights, I started un-boxing the ornaments. And wouldn't you know that the first one I grabbed was PB's tiny shoes ornament? Every year I buy a few ornaments that go with events that happened during the year. The year PB was born I found a miniature ornament...a pair of teeny, tiny shoes. Since he was only 3 1/2 pounds at birth, I thought they'd be perfect. I guess I should have figured they'd make me a little weepy with him gone this year.

In the end, we got the job done, even if we finished at 10:30 that night. It was much more festive having several to help, and we needed some boys here to set up the annual reindeer ambush. I'm not sure The Girl could have done it right.

Whatever we had to do was all worth it to get this shot of The Girl wearing PB's "Mad Bomber" hat out in the hills.