Weekend in Review

I guess I've decided every Monday I'll review the weekend. Maybe it will give me a chance to see where all of our time went so I can plan better for the next weekend.

This weekend was pretty much uneventful. As I say it was uneventful it seems so strange considering we had snow on Friday, Saturday was a crazy day in the world of football and on Sunday we went on the 2009 hunt for the perfect Christmas tree.

Friday evening by 5:30 PM almost all traces of the snow from earlier were gone. If it weren't for the pictures we took there wouldn't be much evidence of snow. We had dinner with our neighbors and then came home and camped out in front of the TV.

Saturday we were running around the house trying to clean while watching some of the college championship games. I was so totally surprised by the Alabama v. Florida game. It seems like the game should have been much closer. If anyone had asked me I would have said it will be a close game but Florida has a good chance of pulling an upset and I would have been wrong. The same thing with the Texas v. Nebraska game, I thought Texas would run away with that game in the first half instead of battling until the final second and winning with a field goal. By the end of the game, my husband, was standing up, holding on to the chair while holding his breath.

Saturday night we stayed up pretty late until 2 AM, but we were both shocked when we didn't wake up until 2 PM on Sunday. I guess we all needed some extra sleep and we're very fortunate MC agreed.

But that meant we got a lot start on getting things accomplished. We had several errands we needed to run, buy more diapers, pick-up a few groceries but most importantly finding the perfect Christmas tree and getting it decorated.

It was about 4 PM by the time we started our search for the perfect tree. Let me take a minute and explain my definition of the perfect tree: first and foremost the perfect tree is always a real tree, ALWAYS, then it must smell like a real Christmas tree and it should be full and tall with no problem areas that need to go against the wall to be hidden. In the past we've learned this is not the easiest task since we living in SE Texas. You can't just go out in the woods or drive to a tree farm, pick out your tree, cut it down and haul it home. And so we're used to driving around to several places looking at trees, smelling the needles, shaking the tree to see how many needles fall and then if we've found the right one, negotiating a better price.

This is a time consuming experience that requires a full stomach, patience and some perseverance. So we should have known that at 4 PM on a rainy, cold afternoon with a small child that tree shopping was going to be challenging to say the least. We started at Costco, moved on to a tree farm, then a local nursery and ended at a garden center.

We'd finally found the perfect tree. It was tall, full and gorgeous and we were wet and tired and ready to be done. My husband went and found someone to carry it through the giant tree maze we were in to the front where it could be trimmed and bailed. But when the gentleman put the tree down we noticed the entire bottom 1.5 feet of the tree was brown. Now we'd tested the branches and they bent like they were supposed to, we'd shaken the tree and very few needles had fallen so why was the bottom brown? Well back out to the maze to continue our search, this time with our flashlight. But after another 15 minutes of searching we were now in complete darkness and it was raining a little harder, so we called the search off.

Now we'll have to go back out today and start over again.