tree season

Find five hats, four pairs of gloves, and four scarves. Put on your layers and your mud boots. Stuff the baby into a down Patagucci suit. Pack Z-Bars and pretzels and spare socks. Load three boys and one carseat into the back of a VW van with a trailer hitched to the back. Meet your friends, the MICE*, at the christmas tree farm in Pleasant Hill.

*MICE: Monthly Improvement Collective of Eugene. 10 adults, 5.5 kids, 3 years to date of monthly home improvement adventures.

(The farm will be familiar to you because you have chaperoned the annual fall field trip to the pumpkin patch there for four years and counting.) Strap the baby to yourself and be grateful for the extra warmth. Get a hot drink. Put scotch in it from Dave's flask. Sit on wet strawbales in the tractor next to your friends and their kids and feel picturesque.

Argue about whether it's worth the extra money to get a noble fir. Recall your childhood Charlie Brown trees and decide it is. Trudge through the mud looking for your perfect tree. Find it. Stand next to it and stake it as yours. Hand your nine year old a saw and watch as he crawls under the tree to saw it down in the rain.

Wait until he gets muddy and frustrated, then your husband will finish the job while your son stomps off pouting because it's hard to cut down a tree.

Take a family photo while your son is still pouting.

Admire your friend Rebecca for cutting down her own tree. Say, if I just didn't have this baby strapped to me, I could do that too. Privately acknowledge that you wouldn't, regardless of the baby.

Get back on the tractor and sing christmas carols ridiculously led by your husband. Miss the Blaines. Feel grateful for good friends, sweet children, and scotch.

Later, decorate your tree with your kids and think, this is what memories are made of.

(Liam, remember when we strapped the baby bjorn to you and made you walk around the house with Lucy the night we decorated the tree?)