Oh, Christmas Tree!

Guess what?

I finished painting the walls in the hallway :)


I was looking for a before shot of my hallway because I never posted one with the chair rail still up. I was actually trying to take a picture of Leah letting me put pigtails in  her hair but it's pretty blurry as you can tell.



Walls before



Annnnnnd......



Walls after!


Did I mention how much I love this color last time?  I love it so much more the more of it I put up. Now I just have to do the trim but I'm working on selecting the perfect color that is in my head. I've got a stack of paint chips to stare at till I figure out which one is the best.


So on to the reason why this post is called Oh, Christmas Tree!

Last year we had tree issues to say the least.

Last year's beautiful tree


The space saver model

 Something last year kept us from having a normal sized tree.

The culprit...



Louie, our cat


This time last year Louie was a small energetic 4 month old kitten. He took down not one but TWO different trees last year.

Last year was also the year we were testing out new trees. We had a beautiful artificial tree we got from a friend when we first got married. It was fantastic in our rental house...in our current house it took up the whole living room. So for the last two years we attempted different configurations of said tree because you could put the branches on individually. Two years ago we put up only 3/4 of the tree, it worked OK but took up a lot of room. The next year Leah was moving and grooving around and we crammed it in a corner and put up only 1/4 of the branches and tied it to a nail in the wall.

So last year we decided it was time for a new tree.

Randall's brother had an extra tree he wasn't using so he gave it to us. It was a smidge on the top heavy side but it was working fine as a tree...during the day... that night apparently Louie took a flying leap at it and it came crashing down and broke some of my ornaments. Put it back up  with only plastic ornaments and down it came again that night. So the score was now Cat 1. Tree 0.

Then my parents gave us the tree they had for most of my living with them years. It's a lovely fiber optic tree with a much steadier base than the other tree. We reconfigured the living room furniture and placed this tree in the corner where he couldn't easily take a flying leap and crash it to the floor. Go us! So night goes by and no crashing. I thought we were in the clear, then I walked out into the living room in the morning... He'd pretty much grabbed and slid down like a fire pole smushing all the branches down and knocking all the ornaments to the floor. Fluffed the tree back up and replaced the ornaments. He did it again. So I fluffed it back up and removed all the ornaments. Yeah he still did it. Score now Cat 2. Tree 0.

Then we came to our final tree. A 4 inch tall Christmas tree ornament that Leah made at school hung on the back of our front door. Woo! Took me two Christmas trees and probably a week's worth of time but I finally outsmarted a cat.

I had a whole year to think about what to do about the tree and of course I didn't. It's now time for Christmas again and Leah has been asking for THREE WEEKS to put up the tree. So today I gave in and I put up the fiber optic tree again, right now there are no ornaments or anything on it, we're on somewhat or a test run to see what Louie is going to do to it. It's been up for two hours now and he's been outside most of that time but when he was in for about 30 minutes he didn't give it a second glance. So who knows maybe he grew out of his hatred of Christmas trees.  I'm leaving the ornaments off till at least this weekend if all goes well. I also have to go get a new light bulb because the one for the tree blew out last year and I never replaced it because I put the tree away.



Let's see how this year goes.