spoken for

I must have been in tenth grade, I was homeschooling, we all were… and it was one of those rare times that my mom went to work.

It was around Christmas and we had the tree up. I remember getting the tree up that year, we wanted a real one but heaven forbid we buy one or cut down one of our pines. No, that was the year we had the dreaded cedar tree, I believe. That was the year mom and one of my brothers cut it down, then dragging it towards the house decided it was too tall and cut it only to then find it way too short. No, that was the year we had the short tree on the kid’s table in the living room.

We were all working on our schoolwork, well, except my youngest brother because he was in Kindegarten and he was already finished (he has always gotten done as soon as possible to move on to bigger and better things).

So we hear a crash and screams and the three of us went running. My youngest brother was screaming in the living room, but where was he? Oh, there, under the tree, there he is. He had been standing on a bar-stool-chair and jumping his GI Joe men from branch to branch when he started to feel like he was falling backwards. So, of course, he leaned forward and grabbed the tree.

We started to pull the tree off of him which only brought out more screams because he also had the lights wrapped around his head.

After detangling him and the tree itself we put it back up. After much frustration, Ryan and I had the tree set back up and looking decent. We went off to have school again.

The tree fell again.

At that point, we basically said “the hell with it” and undecorated it and then threw it off the deck.

We got out the artificial tree, put it up and decorated it…. of course, leaving off any ornament that brought in some sort of disagreement. When we were finished, we had a dying tree off the deck in the backyard, the table gone, and an artificial tree dressed up like a short 70’s department store tree.

Boy, was mom surprised when she came home. :angelicsmile: