Oh Christmas Tree, Oh Christmas Tree...

The kids have spent half of the morning making over-sized paper ornaments for the tree. I am secretly hoping they will fall off and get swept up with the needles at some point, but it is keeping them busy so I won't complain (at least not out loud). That may be one of the toughest parts about being a parent... it has made me into a perpetual liar... "Oh, honey, that is the most beautiful bird I've seen!" "Mom, it's a fish." "Oh." And then finding some way to sneak it into the trash. I think everything my kids make is "special" but our house is small and there just isn't enough room to store or display their creation. Every now and then one of them will open the trash and say, "Hey! Why is my drawing in the trash?" No clue honey. "Someone" must have "accidentally" thrown it away. So I fish it out only to sneak it back in at a later time. My next house will have to have a studio space for the kids. Our dining room table is perpetually covered with paper, markers, crayons, etc. I clean it up about ten times a day, and ten times a day it gets recovered with stuff. There is no keeping up with these kids. A studio space would be nice. And a bigger living room for a big Christmas tree. And a gate around the tree so no one walks into it. And an automatic vacuum cleaner in the gate to pick up the needles since we won't be able to water it because of the gate. At the end of it, we'll end up with a Charlie Brown type tree that will require no work and no gate. Perfect.