The Birthday Tree

A Birthday Tree? you ask..... It looks like a regular Christmas tree, you say. Well, it is and it isn't. Paige's birthday is in the second week of December. Every year we face the tree/decorating dilemma--- Do we decorate for the holidays like we did before Paige came along, or do we wait until after her birthday? Birthdays are pretty special in our house, and we didn't want anything to take away from that. Since Paige will be 4 this year (where did the time go???), we decided to ask her what we should do.

Of course, she was all for putting the tree up. As you can see, we have half a tree up on the coffee table. Well, as you know, Finn is crawling right now. Therefore we have a smaller tree on top of a table where he can't get to it and eat it. We took bets to see how long it would take the cats to figure out how to get up under it to sleep..... Remy blew us both out of the water and was under the tree about 5 minutes after it was up.

After the tree was up, we pulled out all the decorations, and were trying to decide which ones to put on the tree. I started thinking about putting the presents under there, and wondered if I should also put Paige's birthday gifts under. Then I had what my family thinks was a brilliant idea. We'll decorate the tree for Paige's birthday until after her party, and then decorate it for Christmas! That way the tree is up, but we aren't overshadowing her special day with Christmas.

So, I went to Wally, found some pink, silver, and purple ornaments and away we decorated! I've save extras of her birthday invitations over the years, and my plan is to laminate them and put them on the tree as ornaments as well, adding to them every year. I was saving them for scrapbooking, but (let's be honest) when am I ever going to get to scrapbooking them? I think it will be a great way to show how we celebrate her birthday every year.

So tonight, I'm going to wrap birthday presents and put them under the birthday tree.