Christmas Tree Hunting!

The countdown to Christmas is on and that means that it's time for our annual drive to the mountains to find the perfect Christmas tree! 

We look forward to this family tradition every year and I'm pretty sure that one day all of our kids will too, but this year our trip got mixed reviews from our 3.  Olivia was sleepy, Riley was excited and Piper was less than impressed.

This was about as close as we got to a smile from our Pipey that day.  For a little girl who loves the water, being surrounded by the frozen kind was not her cup of tea. 

 Olivia was perfectly content to snooze through her first tree hunt.  With our car loaded so full that you would think we were going on a week long vacation, I was almost certain that we could not have forgotten anything...I was wrong.  I didn't have my wrap and so we all took turns carrying our sleepy little snow bunny and then we made her her very own sleigh bed.

 

 

 

 

 This picture pretty perfectly summarizes our mountain adventure. One kid screaming, one kid sleeping, 1 kid a little too happy and 2 parents in desperate need of a cocktail to help us cope with all of the fun we were having :)

 

Despite my pleas to head home and hit the tree lot on the way, Kris was not deterred and in the end he found a great tree for us to take home!

 

In the end, we were lucky to have 6 adults to help in hauling out 3 great trees and 3 worn out kiddos.

 

 

This is what 2 excited little girls look like when they see our tree set up in our house for the first time...and that makes it all worth while!

 

 When our tree was lit, Piper jumped up and down saying pretty lights, pretty lights!  Then she made sure to tell Olivia all about them.

 

Riley really took the lead in decorating our tree this year.  She was an ornament hanging fool! Thanks to all of her help, I think that every ornament we have made it onto the tree this year.    

Piper tried to help too, but she was more successful at taking things off of the tree rather than putting them on.  I discovered that nothing ticks off a 2 year old more than an uncooperative Christmas ornament.

 I love Christmas and decorating our tree is so much more fun now that our little ones can help now.  We all love looking through the ornaments that we have collected throughout the years, especially the homemade ones that we have from Riley's first years of school.  The girls faves are the ones that play music and our annual Christmas bell that we get each year.

We can't wait for presents under our tree and lots of Christmas fun!