I had my last experience with my first Christmas tree today. At least I think the tree has reached the end of it’s life. We left it up for our little New Year’s Eve get together with Sarah’s sister, Nick, Matt and Kate. The idea was to leave things festive for the evening. So it smelled of pine while we played electronic Taboo and a hearty game of Apples to Apples. Unfortunately for us a late night with lots of wine drinking rapidly becomes an early morning with a demanding baby looking for food attention and fighting off new diapers or a much needed bath. So Monday morning was filled with a headache combined with some baby crying. Sarah and I took it easy for the day by driving out for lunch at Charley’s at the Chestnut Hill Mall and then returning home. I didn’t really feel human until I drank my second iced tea and had a chunk of bread. Madeline was a champ with the crayons though making drawings that looked like dashes both on the paper and in the table. We rented some videos and watched Accepted.

Madeline went to sleep but despite being exhausted I couldn’t really sleep after the movie so I was reading my Murakami book. Then at about 11 O’Clock Madeline started crying. So we tried to calm her down by bringing her into the bed. But she was just bothering Sarah and kicking us a lot while we watched Superman II hoping she would fall asleep. When we gave up on getting her to fall asleep we placed her in her crib where she proceeded to make awful sad crying noises for about twenty minutes. The melodrama of a baby crying because they don’t want to be in a crib is hard to bear. It sounds like some medieval torturer with a lack of mercy is torturing your baby in the other room and she is crying out for help. So we ignored the cries until they quieted down and then when they went silent I fell asleep for a few moments only to be overwhelmed by the fear that the reason she had been crying so much was that there must be something wrong like the cat had suffocated her to make her quiet. So I went into her room to check on her and it startled her so she was awake once again.

Sarah left me in charge of the problem since I was responsible for the second awakening of the little one. So I tried a host of techniques recommended in popular magazines and that I had seen work for other family members or baby sitters like rocking in the chair, singing popular children’s songs, giving her a dropper full of Tylenol, holding her on my shoulder and swinging back and forth in a soothing pattern, offering her some juice to drink. None of this worked and she could be used as a Geiger counter for identifying her crib since every time I got close to it she would raise her voice exponentially. So I gave up and decided to just play along with it. We started with playing with the Tylenol bottle. It has a dropper on the end and she was biting on it but found it much more funny to feed it to me and watch me chew and suck on it. So we played that game for a while. Then I read her a story. Then we went into the other room where the miniature Christmas tree is and we removed, reapplied, and dropped the mini gold ornaments on it about 1000 times. My one stroke of genius was that after she dropped the whole tree off the counter (it is only about a foot high and made out of plastic), I reached over and noticed that I could pull the power cord out of the tree while picking it up along with the ornaments that she had dropped. So we found darkness again at about 3:00 AM. Finally at about 4:00 AM, as the sun was rising,, we went back into her room and I managed to rock myself to sleep only to find her asleep in my arms when I awoke.

So as I was driving home Sarah mentioned that it would be helpful if I were to take the Christmas tree downstairs because it is garbage day tomorrow and we already removed all of the ornaments from it. As a first time Christmas tree owner I had no idea what this entailed. Just walking through the room with the tree left a hurricane of pine needles, attached sap to my hands, and had branches breaking off on every piece of furniture. When I got to the door to the apartment the nine foot tree neither fit through the door nor would it hold on to about 50% of it’s needles so a storm of needles fell on either side of the door. I then dragged it down the stairs brushing against each banister freeing the remaining needles and smaller branches as I made my way out of the building. Finally I threw it in on the curb, looked at it amazed that there was any green part of it left attached and returned to review the path of pine destruction I had made on my way. I then spent the next hour and a half trying to sweep the hallway, clean the scraps off the floor, vacuum wherever the pine needles could be found, including my ear, and pour out the sappy water in the base that held it into the sink.

I did enjoy my first tree. Too bad I wasn’t more alert when I took it out. Luckily Madeline still has that little fake one to play with. And with this vacation done I am ready to get back to some relaxing work.