ornamental

We've got some ornaments up on the tree now. Took the time after church on Sunday to hang ornaments as a family. I always have such fond memories of decorating our tree when I was a kid. We'd get out all the boxes and untagle the lights and hang the ornaments all together, with everybody digging out their favourites, and the quiet delight of remembering those old familiar pieces. My mom would bust out the shortbread and other Christmas baking, and we'd have hot chocolate or tea and garland would be strung and Christmas villages constructed and the Baby would be laid gently in his little porcelain manger. Sigh. End rose colour reverie here and cut to the present day, wherein we try to decorate a tree with an enegetic three year old, a very grabby baby and two tired out adults. 

Ahem. The scene was not so quite so idyllic. Which is not to say that it wasn't fun, for the little people involved at least. 

The Little Dude was very excited to be decorating the tree, and did his trademark blend of capering wildly about and alternately concentrating very carefully on the little things. Like getting these two ornaments hooked together. We don't have a ton of ornaments, as I favour the vintage ones, especially the glass variety, which I've been building up a little collection of over the past couple of years. I pick the up at the thrifts whenever I see them, and have lucked onto a few nice sets even. Though they are not the most 'kid friendly' ornaments.
And of course, this is bound to happen. We've broken four (so far) and I keep the vacuum at the ready for cleaning up the evil little shards. We do have a bunch of soft/rigid non-breakable types too, and those are mostly on the bottom of the tree where little hands can get to them.

Though these particular little hands are very, very persistant. The Baby's reach is surprisingly high. We did what we thought was a sensible job of hanging things up high, but then over the course of the next day had to shift almost everything (breakable or not) up another few feet. So now we have this really weird looking tree that is basically naked for the bottom two feet. It looks really funny, though you only have to be a parent to look at it for a few seconds and realize that this is the house where a crawling baby lives. Either that, or a dog. 

The whole time I was taking photos of the baby reaching for ornaments, I had this funny feeling that this image was so familiar. So I went back into the family albums and found this one: The year was 1976 and my little brother (MrLemurBoy for those of you who know him on the net) was almost exactly the same age as our Baby is now. Baby's birthday is in February and my brother's is in March, so that makes sense. And so funny to see how things don't change. Nine month olds are mobile, grabby little crawlers who want to touch and chew everything. 

He was so pleased to be able to reach a few that I did not stop him right away. And by and large he was very gentle, and just happy to be able to touch that shiny, pretty thing up there in the air. And after all, he was the only member of the family who did not break an ornament that afternoon. (We started yelling 'Opa!' after the second one)
But eventually, for his safety, he was corralled into the playpen with a lovely non-breakable ornament to chomp on. 

Comments

[MrLemurBoy]

So THIS is why I was getting weird messages today! Gah!

[finger thumb]

I wondered how long it would take to filter through to you ;) You can't be annoyed though, its such a cute picture!

[bcgoyl]

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