Ride 'Em Cowboy!

The story you are about to read is not a work of fiction. Any resemblance to people living, or about to be dead, is intentional. Oh – and it’s long.
Back a few weeks ago when this Christmas season was still brimming with hope, peace and love, our little family set about putting up our tree. It was a small snippet of time worthy of a Hallmark movie as we told the girls where each ornament came from and its story in our life. (Every year we get an ornament that represents something significant that happened to our family that year).

Several of the special ornaments are heirloom ornaments that my Grandma Campbell has made for each of her grandkids – and now great-grands – every year for as long as I can remember. They are beautiful ceramic ornaments. I treasure them. This, of course, means that they were going nowhere near our tree this year because we have an 18 month old boy in our house. I told Steve to box them back up and we’d save them for next year.

While we were hanging ornaments we mentioned how we used to get “real” trees from a tree lot every year and how good they smelled etc. Our girls thought we were lying.

Now, despite what you may think about me, I don’t brazenly lie to my children on a regular basis. In fact, the majority of my little white lies are for their benefit (ie. my previously mentioned Santa lie). So, I have no idea why they automatically thought we were making this up.

After some attempts at convincing them, Steve and I realized that we’d done a disservice to our children by never taking them tree shopping, so we decided we’d get a small “real” tree for the window seat in our living room this year. Bonus: We could hang my heirloom ornaments on that tree because no people under 4 ft. tall are allowed in there. Excellent!

This past week we finally went and purchased the tree. Now I’m remembering why we have a fake. First off, it’s frigid while you’re walking around looking at trees that remind me of Charlie Brown but cost more than a new Lexus. Joel was playing the role of Harrison Ford in “The Fugitive” and our girls weren’t nearly as smitten with the tree lot as I felt they should be. (Or, maybe their faces were just frozen in that expression.)

Two stops later we found a 3 ft tree, strapped it to the roof and came home. We quickly had it decorated and propped up in the window seat. It was a beauty and the kids were happy. See photo:




A few days later I foolishly allowed Cadence and Joel into the living room. Okay, really I was feeling bad for our fair-weather chihuahua and let him in to sit in the sunlight streaming through the window. The other two rabble-rousers just followed like sheep.

I was sitting at the kitchen table addressing holiday cards while they waited for Eliana to get home from school.

Then… IT happened. I heard a huge crash.

I ran all 4 feet into the living room, arriving breathless, and found the tree lying in the middle of the room with Joel lying on top of it, water running off the window seat like a Hawaiian waterfall and the ornaments flung all about the room.

I looked at Cadence and she said, “Holy Cow Mama!”

I looked at Joel and he immediately jumped up, started crying and ran to Cadence for comfort. That’s right… I did all that with just a look!

I shooed the children out of the room and shut the door before giving myself a time-out.

(Side note: When I shared this story with my mother she asked if I’d checked to see if Joel was alright. Grandmother-hood has really turned her into a softie! Of course he was fine; he was able to jump up and run to Cadence for protection.)

Later, when I was able to transform from Mom-Hulk back into Mom, I asked Cadence what had happened. She said Joel had climbed into the window seat, squeezed himself between the tree and the window and pushed. Then he rode it down like a bucking bronco.




I’m guessing the ride wasn’t exactly what he was expecting.

You have to understand that this is no normal window seat. It’s a good 2.5 feet off the floor. He had to have pretty much scaled the wall to get up there. And while I do give him snaps for his Spiderman skills, and his miraculous ability to fling ceramic heirloom ornaments 10 feet without breaking any, I found myself just this side of going postal.

I did manage to clean it up and then told my wee-peeps not to tell Daddy Bear about it. He’s stressed enough without hearing about EVERYTHING that happens here when he’s not around.

Too bad I can't keep a secret from him and a few days later I mentioned it. He already knew. I don’t know how he could have known!

Was it the fact that I wasn’t able to get the tree to sit straight in the tree stand after the incident? Perhaps it was that the décor was in a totally different location than before? Or maybe he noticed that something fishy was going down when he walked near the tree and stepped on swampy carpet?


All I know is that later that night as the glow from the tree lights filled the living room, and Joel was in bed, I felt like it would probably all be okay. Someday when he’s a world champion bull rider, Steve and I will look at each other and smile.


Ride 'Em Cowboy!