Tree Hunt!

It’s Wednesday - my day off, so I’m blogging again. The Littles are in bed asleep and Tina and I are watching Elf on Tivo. I can’t remember the last time I saw this, but I’m thinking it was before Kai came home as I was caught off guard by the opening scene with baby Buddy being put to bed in the orphanage. Somehow a fantasy portrayal of an orphanage with rows of cribs hits me differently than what I think the writers are shooting for. Still, it’s a funny movie and I am enjoying it.

Now, on to todays topic: We got the Tree! We were originally planning on going to get it next weekend, but the weatherman is calling for a big time cold snap with snow and everything. Since today was mostly dry in what’s been a pretty wet spell we decided to keep Kai and Shen out of their respective preschools and go today.

We were bummed that Ben couldn’t go with us today as he has to be in school or he can’t go to swim team practice. But Cam and Brittni came along with us to get their tree too, and it was great having them come as it’s been a couple years since Cam has come along to get the tree with us. And as it turns out, we couldn’t have done it without them!

We drove out the Mount Baker Highway and stopped at the Hungry Bear restaurant in Deming for lunch. After we fueled the boys up on giant cups of cocoa we pressed on to Van Zandt and the Alpine Meadows Christmas Tree Farm. We used to go to this tree farm all the time, but started going to a different one the last few years. It was funny going on a Wednesday. We were the only ones there so we had the whole place to ourselves. As we do every year, we walked way into the trees looking for the perfect one. Cam and Brittni were looking for a table-top sized tree and found a nice little one. We actually found ours pretty quickly - I think Ben would have wanted to look at a few more, but he wasn’t with us so we managed to settle on one a bit faster.

So we cut our trees and hauled them back to the barn to pay for them and drink more cocoa. The tree guy came and measured the trees then wrote up our receipt. Cam told him that he was paying for the little one, but I said I would pay for both. Cam resisted at first but I insisted so Cam graciously relented. I had spent all my cash at lunch so I asked the tree guy if they took debit cards - nope. No problem, Tina has the checkbook with her. Oh wait, there’s no checks in it. So like I said before, it was lucky Cam and Brittni came as they ended up paying for both trees! He did let me pay him back later, but it did make for a great moment.

Here’s some pictures...