The LilyPad: The Madness Begins: Tree Trimming

[Ed Note: We are in New Jersey now visiting family and in a fit of fit time while the cousins play out in the snow I am going to try to do some catch-up here. It would be lunacy to try to, you know, actually catch up - so let's just see if I can post about our December]

December is a particularly crazy time for us. It starts back on November 16th with our niece Sera's birthday and then just accelerates into insanity. Soon following is Thanksgiving and then my Mom's birthday on Nov 28. Next up is Gordon on Dec 8th, his Mom on Dec 12th and Lily on Dec 22nd. Then there's Christmas. I literally spend the entire month in a state of panic and usually flub on at least one birthday gift a year (this year it was Gordon's - sorry honey!).

The official start to the season of nuttiness in the MasterWong household is Thanksgiving weekend. We spend Thanksgiving in Fall River at my cousin Gail's with extended family and then head back to Somerville for a pretty lazy few days. Later in the weekend we have my parents and Eric and Liza over for yet another dinner, tree trimming and Mom's birthday cake. One reason we can get the tree up so early is that we're still rocking the artificial tree that we bought 5 or 6 years ago while we were living in Medford. Every year I think that perhaps we'll get a real tree - but then cannot resist the siren song of the pre-lit, happy little number sitting in our storage closet. Perhaps when we move into a bigger place.....

Lily is super into decorations so she loves the tree trimming frenzy. Quinn got pretty into it this year too. Here he is making sure we assembled the pieces in the right order:

Jeh Jeh quickly came over to show him how it was done.

Note that the tree decorating is proceeding nicely with ornaments well placed on the tree - some on the bottom and the top. You should know that our tree only looked this way for one day. After that the ornaments quickly migrated to the top of the tree as Quinn took them off and hid them around the house. Sometimes he'd bring them to me "Here you go!". By now the bottom third of the tree is completely bear, and I'm sure we'll be finding ornaments in the couch cushions until we move out.

Getting help with the all-important "filling of the ornament bowl". The bowl is then placed where no little hands can reach it so we don't like end up in the ER or anything.