Melder Christmas Tree 2011, Part 2

As promised, here is another post on our Christmas tree. This has been such a fun Christmas season (already) because Koen is just so excited about all the traditions. I love it! He took a great nap, played in his room for awhile and then at 5pm we got him up and brought him down to help me decorate the tree. Doug had done the lights during naptime, I think it'll be a few more years before that's something we include him in (it's one of Doug's least favorite jobs, so having an inquisitive helper would probably just make it worse). First, Koen helped me go down to the basement and get all the decorations. I was impressed that he was actually very helpful and we got everything in two trips instead of me having to make four trips on my own.

As quickly as possible we moved on to decorating. Koen could barely wait another second. Last year he had a hard time getting the little strings at the top of ornaments on the tree branches. This year he was a pro. He was very thoughtful in his placement and design.After only a few minutes it was quite obvious that we needed to encourage him to spread them out around the tree, up, down, side to side. We basically had about 20 in a 2 feet square area. I didn't care though, I loved that he was enjoying the process (and I can always fix things when he's not looking).Look at the concentration!Doug tried to get some photos of us working together, but we were both so into our task that we didn't really catch many good shots of us both hanging at the same time in the same place. You can see Koen going back for more ornaments in this shot.Doug had us pose for a quick moment. Koen wanted to get right back to it though, so his "cheese" is quite distracted.In this shot you can see Tavin was also awake by a little after 5pm. It was amazing. During his nap yesterday he would cough and wake up screaming, then I would console him and he fell back asleep. I think I did that 4 times. I knew he wasn't feeling good that he would actually go back to sleep so easily. But then magically at 5pm when he woke up at the end of his nap he was happily talking to himself and playing in his crib. Doug went up to get him and brought him down to join us. He was his usual self (with some extra snot). It was such a relief to see him turn the corner and the fever was gone!
Tavin played a little on his own, but when he realized I had the camera out he kept following me around and saying, "cheese." He was so persistent that I could barely do any decorating with Koen. I said to Doug, "babe, can you play with Tavin, this is getting a little old." And Koen says, "yeah, Daddy, Tavin's getting old." Oops!
Here are the adorable pictures I "had" to take of Tavin to appease him. He kept putting the drum on to get me to take the pictures because of the fact I was camera happy about the drums when we made them the other day.I guess you can see that Tavin was back to his normal self personality-wise last night. So thankful! He was perplexed by the decorations a little bit. He couldn't seem to understand why Koen and I were having so much fun with this process of hanging little things on a spikey plant.Doug made the boys Christmas pasta for dinner. Here's my hungry helper digging in...Koen and I returned to work on the tree after his dinner. He really did a great job keeping focused and listening to instructions and just enjoying the whole process. I loved it. Here's the finished product (I forgot to take a pic last night, so here's one from today).Good job, Koen! Thanks for all your help. Looking forward to enjoying the rest of the season with all my Melder boys.