the third times a charm?

I got out the boxes of Christmas decorations right after Thanksgiving. They sat in my living room for 3 weeks while we have proceeded to go through a round of stomach bugs and icky colds one child at a time. So, we were mostly better and Jes and I took the girls to do some Christmas shopping at the store I detest going to the most.

We were at Wal-Mart (hate it), and we came up with a BRILLIANT idea. "Why don't we just buy one of these here cheap-o little pre-lit trees, let the kids decorate it with their un-breakable ornaments, and the ornaments that have no special meaning, that way, when the twins wreak havoc on it, we'll just be like," eh, it's okay, it's just the kids tree.'" We already know that our "destroying angels" will kill anything nice we put out to decorate, so we thought we would just make it easy on ourselves.

We congratulated ourselves on our smartness, and proceeded to look everywhere for the trees in the display, except the logical location of the actual trees, which was outside. Once we found them, we could only find a tree with colored lights, so we said to ourselves," we prefer white lights, but its the kids tree, so I'm sure it will be fine."

No. We forgot one important detail. The tree was from Wal-Mart. So, no, in the above pictures, we are actually decieving you a little bit. This is not at all what our tree looks like now. I'll explain.

We brought the tree home. We set it up. It was a bit charlie brown christmas tree, but liveable. Until we were decorating it. It photographed much better than it looked in real life. It looked TERRIBLE. and UGLY. very very UGLY. So, ugly, in fact, that about 3/4 of the way through decorating it, right after the pictures were taken, we decided to do ourselves a favor and take the ugly thing back. So we didn't have to look at its hideous, teal, orangey yellow, fuschia and greeny lights anymore! Bleh. puh! good riddance.

So, Jes decided to go to Lowe's to get a tree instead. Same idea, just a little nicer, and WHITE lights. PLEASE! WHITE LIGHTS! The box he brought home was labeled CLEAR lights. But, when we opened it up....COLORED lights. Again, he returns to the store. This time, he and the manager open EVERY SINGLE BOX, and all the lights are COLORED. They finally take down the display and give it to him to buy. Yay! By this time, all the kids are in bed, and then we decorate the tree, a bit less enthusiastically than the first go round. Oh well! At least the kids had a good time decorating it!

p.s. I decided to put some glass ornaments on the tree that I bought on clearance last year at Target. Why did I do this. I don't know. So, far we've lost 4 of them.