The story about the ornaments....

It's the Holidays!

I'm really trying to get in the holiday spirit. Its a little hard for me for many reasons.

I try not to be a Grinch especially for the younger kids.

One of the reasons which is probably silly to some but to me its hard for me to accept.

We use to have a neighbor that lived alone and she was in her 90's. She was so sweet and she would randomly show up to our house and unload a car load of stuff she wanted to get rid of.

It was stuff like toys, bedding, kitchen items, ect.

I then would say "thank you but we don't need it" and she would just ignore me.

I think she just needed someone to take it off her hands and she wanted to give the kids toys.

I would then load my car up and donate the items.

About 3 years ago......

One time she came to my house while I wasn't home and dropped a ton of stuff off at our back door.

It was a bunch of Holiday items

Lots and Lots and Lots of Christmas stuff!

I had my boys put it in the garage until I had time to go thru it.

So....

In one of my lets get organized moods

I had my boys go to the garage and get all the Goodwill items and load up the car.
Then I said get the items our neighbor dropped off also.

Well I didn't pay attention and my sweet boys loaded up one of my Christmas buckets into the car.

Off I left to Goodwill and happily donated

I love getting rid of stuff we don't need

This was summer time and how my bucket got mixed in I still cant figure out.

When December rolled around I had my kids go get all my Holiday buckets from the garage.

We get ready to decorate the tree and I tell my boys to go find the ornament bucket from the garage.

I must of sent them out 3 or 4 times before I went to look myself.

No bucket in sight!

I even had Mikey go look for it

I then realized what had happened

My bucket was donated!

All 5 of my kids ornaments for 20 years are gone!

I go down to the Goodwill and nothing

This is horrible!

I was hoping to give my kids their ornaments when they started their own families.

I was devastated and wanted to kick myself.

So since then when its time to decorate our tree, I really have a hard time.

Some friends of ours recently gave us Disney ornaments and it made me so happy.

 So here is our tree

All the kids have good attitudes about it

Thank goodness the kids made some cute stuff at school for our tree

So what did I learn?

Go thru everything before donating