Christmasses Past

Disclaimer: None of the following pictures are mine. Mine were lost during a divorce. The stories are mine.

I stopped to visit a friend of mine today. She is pregnant, has a 13 month old and watches another girl's 14 month old. She also has a full-size fully decorated Christmas tree in her living room. She is very good with the kids and very good at keeping her munchkins and her tree safe.

I, at the same age, was much lazier.

I was married, had a 2 year old, a 5 year old, 2 stepsons, 4 inside dogs, 2600 square feet of white wool carpet in an old constantly renovated farmhouse with 11 interior sliding glass doors.

The first year that we were in the house, I combined the following three items:

Yep, I put the tree in the playpen and decorated the playpen with garland. It worked excellently well! The tree and the presents were corralled and I did not have to spend the whole holiday yelling. (I was a yeller!)

The next year, we put the tree in the formal living room - the one with the fireplace and the cathedral ceiling.

We hung it upside down.

Still safe from kids and dogs - but no safe place for the gifts!

More on the move

The house is moved. Nothing - I repeat, nothing - got broken or even bent. OK, so there was the time the next day when the blocks under the tongue cracked and we had to get the loader and lift the house and put REALLY big pieces of wood under the tongue until the set up guys could get there.

The dogs are ecstatic. They have a fenced in yard with grass (that's certainly new in their lives) and a swimming pool - the a/c is not yet hooked up.

I have pictures of my daughter doing manual labor - she works very hard a lot of the time - we just never get any pictures of her going it....until now! Proof that she will work for steak.

So, on Monday Julie and I decided we should go to the big town (Amarillo) and have some Pei Wei http://www.peiwei.com/ and just relax a little. We did and the food was wonderful. We decided to stop and look at some oak trees on the way home. Julie's little man had planted a red oak last year when he was here. It was just a little stick tree and the neighbor's goats ate it. His Grampits wanted to plant a red oak and just sort of not mention that it was a different tree - you know how Grampits' are.

Anyway, we went to Lowe's and looked at the trees. They had 2 - count them, 2 - red oaks left so of course we HAD to buy one. Now, we live in the country and we do have pickup trucks. Did we drive one to town. Of course not.

The tree - a 15 foot oak - will, in fact, fit in the back seat of a Lincoln Town Car.

We did not pass any bicyclists in the 50 miles we drove home - drat the luck!