Ah, the kid's tree (or is it Charlie Brown's?)

No pictures of assembling the tree this year, but if you really want to see what that chaos looks like, feel free to check out last year's post, or the year before that, or the year before that.  We put my tree up on Friday, and I began decorating it on Saturday.  We put the kid's tree up on Sunday, and then decorated it for FHE.

 This was the first year where neither Eric nor I helped the kids put their ornaments on the tree, which makes for a very unbalanced tree-their ornaments are all in the center third of the tree.  (I can't tell you how hard it is to refrain myself from rearranging their ornaments to balance them all out.)  Eric and I put up the family ornaments, closer to the top, of course.  This is the first year we haven't put up any of our childhood ornaments, our own children's ornaments filled the tree nicely.


this may be Davin's last year for putting up the star




look, no ornaments at the top!



 I love this FHE tradition.  Now, I know many of you with real trees feel sorry for us here in Arizona having to have fakes.  But don't worry, since this particular tree is 9 years old, I still get to experience the joy of vacuuming up fallen needles.  We had so many, in fact, that the kids were collecting them and throwing them, my carpet and my tile were covered in plastic needles.  The upside, plastic needles don't poke your feet when you step on them.