I hope everyone has had and is still having a peaceful holiday.  So far we’ve been pretty low key on our home front.  No giant blow outs where two family members gang up on one.  Not too much talking behind each others back.  The men folk haven’t even had to hide as often as they used to to make sure they didn’t get hit with any flying knives.  That’s the trend at most of our family functions.  As many of you know, when you have a family with all girls and a strong willed mom whom raised all the girls to be pains in the asses too, it can get pretty volatile around the holidays.  In times past I remember plenty of objects getting “accidentally” tossed at each other and even some minor hair pulling.  But most commonly, lots and lots of screaming and yelling.  Even in the times when the number of men have outnumbered the women, it seemed like the ratio for turbulence was still higher on our side.  Husbands, boyfriends, and nephews either didn’t have the courage or were just too smart to get involved in our blow ups. I know we women can get really, really scary.  Picture in your mind the image of the sweet and innocent female suddenly turning into a bitter and evil medusa. If I were a man in this family I’d be hiding under the porch in the backyard too praying that the women didn’t catch their scent.  But as I said, this year has been different… so far.  I think it’s EJ.  It’s really hard to spit fire and nails when there is a perky little face smiling at you with her little dimple.  Kinda takes the heat out of most situations.  Either she will smile, squeal, cry or start grunting and turning purple which is seems to be cause for everyone to stop talking so we can watch her poop.  I can’t wait to tell her the stories of her first Christmas.  

Here’s a nice picture of her Christmas morning.  She found that it was a waste of time to open the gift first to get to that yummy paper. 

Yummy, snarf snarf, mmmmm paper!

It’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas.  Today we went and and chopped down our Christmas tree.   Ok, so we went to the big red and white tented tree city that pops up every year down the road.  Our tree is a BIG FAT 7 footer that is now filling the space we gave it to live in for the holiday season.  Some how we ended up with a deal on it.  I think they marked the price wrong.  Most of the 7 foot fat ones were at least 10 bucks more than this one.  EJ, Dear Hubby and I went round and round in circles under the big tent until EJ was ready to revolt.  You would think she would be excited about her first Christmas tree.  She’s 6 months now.  She should be able to have a vote on how big and fat the tree should be.  She’s the one who’s going to be crawling under it by the 25th.  But Nooooo, all she did was whine.  I know, we’re terrible parents finding her whimpers adorable.  We did manage to get a couple photos of her before she lost her grip.  She was wearing the cutest little santa hat.  I think she likes her hat but she didn’t like going that long with out a solid meal.  Juice in a sippy cup is not a meal. Ask her, she’ll tell you. 

As I went to the front of the tent to hunt down one of the college students that sells the trees, usually found out back in the employee area playing with the chain saws, to tell them that we found our perfect family tree, I discovered our perfect BIG FAT family tree.  Even better!  This one was sitting right next to the check out stand.  I have no clue why it was marked the way it was.  I didn’t want to ask.  I did ask the kid why the ticket was duck taped together and he said it was because some other family thought it was their perfect family tree and changed their minds.  Um, ok, I’ll take it!  Then I had to go back and get Dear Hubby who was where I left him stalking our perfect family tree to make sure no one else fell in love with it.   He rolled his eyes at me and asked me if I was sure this was the one…again.  Apparently I’d had already picked out a few too many perfect family trees.  But I assured him it was…THE ONE!  All Dear Hubby had to say was “Thank God”. 

Guess what happened!!  When we went to run our credit card their phone line went dead!   Just our luck.  We find the most perfect BIG FAT family tree and we can’t buy it.  I was ready to pee on it to make it mine while the sales kid was scratching the lice in his dread locks trying to figure out what to do next.  Finally he said just take it home and I’ll call you later and run your card.  WOW!  Can you believe it?  I was just shocked!  People just don’t do that any more.  I’m talking trust here.  How often can you hand over something to anyone, it doesn’t matter if it cost $1 or $100, and trust that they will pay later with out getting back ground info, personal identification info and collateral.  As I would say my next born child, or as Dear Hubby would say his left nut.  But this kid did.  He didn’t strike me as the unintelligent type.  College student.  Probably hasn’t seen a whole lot of negative in life yet but not stupid about it either.  I know my husband and I don’t exactly scream criminal standing there in our polo shirts and christmas hats but you never know…  We could be that perfect BIG FAT Christmas tree thieves that he didn’t get the memo about.   But he trusted us and we got to take our cranky daughter and our perfect BIG FAT tree home.  

It was several hours later that the tree kid called us about paying.  Dear Hubby didn’t see that he called for another hour.  When he told me that I pictured the poor kid sitting there crapping his pants thinking that he messed up good this time.  Can you imagine how relived he was when Dear Hubby called him back?   Merry Christmas kid.  You can still keep your faith in humanity.

We now have our perfect BIG FAT tree set up, still naked, in our living room.  It smells soooo good!  I wish I could describe the smell with something other than Pine-sol.  For me it just smells like Christmas.   

Smiles!

Sorry the picture is so red. This is what happens when your under a big red and white tent. You turn into a tomato.

This is our BIG FAT tree.