O Christmas Tree

The Christmas tree is up, which has been an enormous source of joy for Julia. In fact, she declared that yesterday was "the best day I EVER had!" after returning home from Volante Farms with Ethan, proudly showing off "the PERFECT Christmas tree." Not only did they return with a tree, but also with four new ornaments to hang, one for each of us. Julia's ornament was a mermaid that she named Cassandra, and she has spent an inordinate amount of time lying on her tummy at the base of the tree playing with Cassandra, who is "The Youngest Mermaid," but who is able to grow older at long last thanks to a magical spell cast on her by one of the other ornaments. I asked if I could take a picture of The Youngest Mermaid for the blog. "Sure," she replied, holding Cassandra up for the camera:



Then, after I took the photo, she asked, "Did she smile?"

Ethan and I had been agonizing over where to put the tree so that we could potentially block Madeleine from gaining access to it, and after all our efforts, it turned out she was completely uninterested in the tree. Her newest fascination has been sitting at Julia's little art table; she now prefers to take her meals there along with Julia:




In fact, this morning I got totally ditched at the big table by everyone:



And, cycling back to the original theme of this post, in an effort to have some sort of correlating conclusion, I present to you our tree:


Ta da!