Christmas With a Crawler

Pretty much everything changes when you have a baby . . . the amount of sleep you get, when you eat (and if you're breastfeeding, what you eat), your social event calendar, vacations, and of course, holidays.  Last year at this time we were anxiously awaiting the arrival of Kate, who was due in January.  We envisioned how different our Christmas would be with a soon-to-be one-year-old.

Well, here comes Christmas, and here comes Kate . . . headed for the tree again.  We haven't even trimmed our tree yet, and already Kate has taken quite an interest in it.  So, what do you do when you have a child between the ages of 6 - 18 months (and maybe even older) who doesn't understand not to pull on the branches, break the ornaments, or eat the pine needles?  After doing a bit of research, here were a few ideas I found:

1 - Put the tree in a playpen.  You know, the pack-n-play your child sleeps in when you're out visiting or on vacation.  Problem is, we didn't really think about that ahead of time, and there's no way our tree would fit in the pack-n-play.  Guess that idea's out.

2 - Don't decorate the part of the tree within your child's reach.  Like this, except opposite:

But that just seems sort of sad.  I mean, won't the bottom half of the Christmas tree feel left out?  Or at least naked?  Yeah, it's a good idea, but no.

3 - And then, there's the small tree option.  Buy a tree that's 3 - 4 feet high, and then just put it up somewhere . . . out of reach.

Image from Country Living

Well, we've had a small tree the last two years, so we were ready to go big.  So we went big and went home with a big Christmas tree this year.

4 - Last option, barricade the tree with large, heavy presents.  Bingo!  This is the option we're going to try.

Emphasis on large and heavy (the suggestion was to fill them with something heavy - we're going to fill them with water bottles) and then wrap them, forming a ring of protection around the tree.

Any other ideas?  I'll keep you posted on how it goes!