The enormous tree cage getting a coat of primer
Wooooooo, y'all, only 4 days (really 3 1/2) days until Thanksgiving!!!! I cannot wait! I did my big grocery shopping trip this weekend to get all my ingredients, and I currently have over three pounds of cream cheese in my refrigerator. I'll be cooking something every day between now and Thursday. Tonight Mason and I are baking the cutest turkey cookies for his class. They're sugar cookies decorated to look like turkeys, and I think it will be a really fun Mommy and Mason project. Tomorrow I'm going to do the cranberry sauce for Thursday. Wednesday is the big baking day- I'm doing pumpkin cupcakes with cream cheese frosting, and these crazy-good streusel-topped apple cheesecake bars. I'll also make the sundried tomato/pesto/cream cheese appetizer. (so with those things alone, we're looking at two pounds of cream cheese!) Thursday morning I'll do the squash casserole before we go to my mom's for more family fun and food than you can shake a stick at!! But the fun doesn't end there. Oh no, it's only beginning. That night I'll come home and make a pumpkin cream pie (more cream cheese!!) for Thanksmas.
What is Thanksmas, you may ask. Well, Thanksmas is a holiday of my own creation that takes place the following day. Matt's mom will come over with a big ol' turkey that she made. After we go to the tree farm and get our gorgeous Frazer fir, we'll come home and eat Thanksgiving leftover sandwiches (turkey, dressing, cranberry sauce all piled on white bread- YUMMMMMM) followed by the aforementioned pie. The rest of the afternoon will be spent decking the halls. Matt's mom generally has to work at the hospital on Thanksgiving, and she is the unchallenged queen of Christmas decorating, so out of this, Thanksmas was born!
Keeping a Christmas tree safe from my wily twins was a big challenge this year, but I think my dad and I solved that problem! I came up with a design for a kind of "decorative fence" around the tree and enlisted my dad's help in bringing my vision to life. We started Saturday morning at Lowes, and $125 worth of lumber and 8 hours of labor later, we have a tree cage that is a sight to behold!! I'm still working on getting that sucker painted, but I swear, ain't nobody gettin past this thing! It is a veritable Fort Knox of tree enclosures! It consists of two sections of railing that bolt together, then bolt to a 4x4 plywood platform that slides into the corner of the living room. It's designed to break down into three large, but flat pieces for storage, and should withstand years, decades, perhaps centuries of use!!! The plan is to thwart the attempts of babies trying to get to the Christmas tree for generations to come. Plus, my dad and I had a good time building it together. We had a few mishaps. We used decking posts and spindles, and realized just in the nick of time that if we didn't cut this thing down some, we were going to have an enormous deck around the tree rather than a fence! I measured one piece of lumber wrong, and we underestimated the number of spindles we'd need, but that only resulted in one additional trip to Lowes. We were quite sore the next day, but it was totally worth it to get to spend a fun and memorable day with my dad!
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