Christmas Tree Hunting...a cactus story.

Literally!!! We went hunting for a tree. The Monday after Thanksgiving we went for a drive looking for the perfect tree. It took a little while and quite a bit of pain to get it, but it is now standing tall and proud in our family room. We found it and kept driving a little more to see if there was anything better. We had taken a side road and got out to walk around. We let Kiley get out to stretch her legs and she tried her best to follow her dad everywhere he went. She thought it was so fun to be outside hiking around looking for a tree. Chad had gone down the road a little ways to see if he could find any great trees and Kiley and I were following quite a ways behind. Kiley saw him coming back through some trees and decided she needed to run to catch up to him. Unfortunately she tripped.

Now usually this is no big deal. We just tell her good job and to get up and try again, which she 90% of the time does without any second thought. This time, however, we were not so lucky. When she tripped, she landed right on a cactus. She cried for a second and then screamed when we tried to take some of the needles out of her hand. As long as we weren’t touching her hand, she was fine. There were a lot of needles though and they needed to come out. We had to hold her down and pluck the needles out of her hand. She hates to be pinned down and started screaming. Now I’m pretty sure she was crying about being pinned down and not from pain since we had to go through the same screaming earlier in the day when we pinned her down to cut her fingernails and every night when we have to brush her teeth. I felt bad though and so did Chad. He was the good one who plucked as many of the needles out as she would let him.

So this ended our Christmas tree hunt quickly. We drove back to where we saw the tree, got out and I took the first shot with Chad’s 20 gage shot gun. Chad took the next 4 shots and luckily the tree finally broke since we were then out of shells. Our tree only took 2 shots last year to get down. Anyway, we came home and decorated it. Kiley has some scabs on her hand from the cactus, but didn’t complain much about it. Once or twice she did show us her hand and get a big frown and tell us that it was bothering her. But for the most part, she hasn’t complained about it. Just don’t try to hold her hand to look at it; she’s afraid you’ll try to pin her down.

Sad girl after being tortured by Mom and Dad.

Chad has the tree loaded up and ready to go.