Dec 13 2011
Christmas Tree (Twice)
We had some Christmas Tree Drama over the past couple weeks. Of course, I guess that’s to be expected with a three-year-old in the house…
First we got out our trusty ol’ artificial tree. Seven feet tall, got it for ONE DOLLAR at a garage sale, and it’s a nice looking one to boot – can’t beat that! The tree stood bare in our living room for about a week. (Please pardon my crummy phone pictures!)
No decorations yet!
Bare Tree - SO BORING
Then after we added lights and let it sit for a couple more days, we got the decorations out and let Jeremy get started with some of the less-breakable (or so we thought) ones. He was very excited and I grabbed a picture of his little low-tree cluster of decorating (see below).
Ta-Da!
This was before the drama struck. Jeremy had a LOT of fun, and about three candy canes, and got a bit too hyped up. He started throwing toys and decorations at the tree in fun, but it was getting too messy. Then toys were getting lost in the tree, and he was knocking things down trying to dig them out. Jon and I got tired of retrieving them for him, so we told him that any more toys being thrown into the tree would be confiscated. So as an alternate game, Jeremy started whacking the tree branches and yanking strands of lights. HARD. Ornaments were flying, “un-breakable” ornaments were losing pieces, everything was just falling apart. Jeremy was not listening to a word we were saying. He was having a blast, but causing a lot of destruction, and eventually we took ALL the decorations off the tree to show how serious we were. The branch and light yanking continued and got even more violent, so Jeremy was put to bed early.
Two weeks later, we decided to give it another go. On a tip from Kate (their family and ours got together to take some pictures – hope to get those up soon!), we picked up some plastic decorations at Menards and re-decorated the tree with Jeremy’s help. This time things went a lot better, and we love our beautiful and TOUGH new ornaments! They are various brown and gold mirrored and satin balls, and we added a gold-trimmed red ribbon. Jeremy decided to also add a few small velvet bows:
Adding the red bows
And here’s the finished product.
All done!
The finished project is lovely! We have the similar colored ornaments for one of our trees. (Of course with the move, we didn’t put up any trees this year inside.)
As for Jeremy….I would have to say that you and Jon had farrr more patience and leeway about the tree debacle than I would have! I’m not sure I would have let him decorate the second time around….even a 3 year old would understand “no fun stuff if you’re just gonna wreck it”.
Happily it’s all done now…Let’s hope he doesn’t decide to do a rerun of his first activity
Awesome tree! Great idea of plastic ornaments. You’d never know. From the pictures at least they look glass. People will wonder how you keep them in one piece. We have our tree up. Our kids are older so we have breakable ornaments on the tree. Jeremy is a cutie. I like the pics. Cute zebra car too!It’s good that he got to be included in decorating the tree. I know my kids love it so I assume other kids do too. I’m sure he had fun.It was fun to read this.