I don't know about all you other working moms out there, but I feel compelled to do
everything with Katie. I want to cook with her, craft with her, shop with her, etc. I don't want her to miss one single experience. She handles it fairly well, and it's usually Momma that ends up tired and cranky at the end of it. Such was the case last night when I pushed us to get the tree decorated. Keep in mind we'd been at a family get together for most of the afternoon, Doug had a cold, and Katie didn't take an afternoon nap.
I started off by changing into my Christmas jammies and giving Katie hers to open. I want to start a tradition that Mrs. Claus leaves her Christmas jammies (all wrapped up in special packaging) right after Thanksgiving so she has the whole month to wear them. Yeah that didn't work so well. Maybe in a year or two when she might understand the whole Santa/presents thing.
After we were in our jammies and had our eggnog we started opening the boxes. In past years Doug would lay out ornaments and I would find the perfect place on the tree. We typically don't have a big tree/many ornaments so it took us maybe 20 minutes to do all of this if the tree was already set up. I think it took us an hour last night! Katie loved going through the ornaments and she handled everything very delicately.
Then it was time to hang the first ornament, and we thought we'd have Katie do it. I pulled out her first Christmas ornament, went over to the tree with her and helped her carefully hang it on a low branch. We stepped back and she reached out to it and snatched it back off the tree. That was apparently not the right spot. We tried again with the same results. Finally I took the ornament and hung it up where she couldn't reach it. We tried letting her hang one again with Doug, but we had similar results. Again, maybe this will go better next year.
The rest of trimming went about the same way. Katie pulling off the ornaments as fast as we could put them on and us putting them up higher and higher. We had a good time though.
As you can see, it all worked out in the end. A beautiful Christmas tree for our beautiful daughter.
2 comments:
Love this post! And I can identify with everything in it. :)
Next year will definitely be better with regards to understanding Santa and presents. Hazel is obsessed with Santa this year, whereas last year she didn't really understand.
Love that tradition of incorporating Mrs. Claus!
Who better to leave jammies than Mrs. Claus? :) You can totally steal it if you want. I had grand plans of having the jammies wrapped up on her bed when we got home from our Thanksgiving visiting. Oh well, maybe next year!
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