Can't blame them for trying! (Giggles) reminds me of the time my (then 2yo) son "rescued" my mobile phone from out of the toilet!!

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Optimism is the faith that leads to achievement; nothing can be done without hope. - HELEN KELLER

Buffy- please tell me you took pics of the sugar fiasco! You will cherish them in years to come!

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There is no problem that cannot be solved with time, patience, and a judicious amount of high explosives.

Springie, I love those pictures! They had me !

Buffy, I hope the cleanup didn't take too long!

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Oh, Buffy....and Springie!

What a crack up! You just gotta love kids! (says she who only has furkids)

The elves sound like a great tradition, Buffy - the time and effort involved will be appreciated, once your children are old enough to have children of their own and want to carry on with things they remember from their own childhoods.

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Exaggeration misleads the credulous and offends the perceptive. ~Eliza Cook

Oh, Buffy and Springie! Your stories, and kids, are just adorable!

Springie ... thanks for sharing your photos! ... still giggling!!

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To be or not to be a gatchamaniac - that's the dilemma!

Ah, so if he'd just moved them back to the big tree himself, before you did, he might very well have gotten away with it!


My problem this year was discovering, shortly after putting gifts that I'd just wrapped (and I use of lot of that thin ribbon that you curl with scissors) under the tree, was that my new cat loves to chew and eat ribbon!

So, all the presents (one with some slightly chewed ribbon) that I'd wrapped got hastily moved to a bedroom that Sharpie's not allowed to go into. Except that the next day, the BF wasn't paying attention and let Sharpie into that room by mistake. Much ribbon chewed off and eaten! I was freaking out that my cat was going to die from an impacted bowel or some such thing. But very fortunately, within an hour, Sharpie proceeded to puke it all up. Unfortunately, despite all the hardwood or tiled floor available to him, he chose to puke on the palest-coloured carpet in the house.

Fortunately, the BF owns a carpet-cleaner...

It sounds like a few children and pets had great fun in the time leading up to Christmas getting into all sorts of mischief.


Buffy how old are your children? It sounds like a very interesting tradition. Almost makes me wish for children of my own.

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Don't sweat the petty things and don't pet the sweaty things.

And oh...we did have one more exiting Elf moment.

This year, my elder son has started having suspicions about the validity of his elf. "Mom, are they just dolls that you and daddy move around?"



This troubled him one day a great deal, and so I asked him if he wanted an answer or if he would prefer the fun of the mystery. When faced with that option he definitely preferred the mystery. He said he'd figure it out on his own. He had a plan to find out the truth.



Putting the children to bed that night, I noticed he had put both elves into their makeshift basket bed surrounded by booby traps. I wondered if anyone would be caught in the boobytraps.

Never fear though, I got up in the middle of the night though and found little white footprints leading from my younger son's bed (where his elf was now sleeping with a suspicious white substance on his hands, feet, and mouth), allllll the way down the stairs to the living room where there was my older son's elf sprawled out in a sugar coma with a gingerbread man in his lap, and powdered sugar all over the table. The booby traps up in the bedroom were still apparently functional, so the elves bypassed them with no problems. Hubby got the boys up for school the next morning as I had a headache.

I heard, "Whisper whisper mumble?" *thump thump thump pitter patter feet * "Whisper, mumble MUMBLE???" *thump thump thump THUMP down the stairs* "Giggle Giggle Whooo! Hahaha Mumble MUMBLE!!" *Thumpity Thumpity back up the stairs * "Chatter chatter giggle chatter " *thumpity thumpity thumpity back down the stairs * Pause. Then: *whirrrrrrrrrrrRRRRrrrrrrrrrrrr* vacuum cleaner on the stairs.



I giggled in my bed at all the sound effects, but the entertainment wasn't over. The husband comes in and informs me that the booby traps were a red herring. My son apparently demanded that dad present his hands for examination. In the boys' room is a black light. My resourceful child had laid a big flat lego mat on top of the elves' bed, which would have to be moved for them to get out of bed. He had coated the top of the mat with florescent marker. Anyone who touched the lego mat to move it would have florescent marker on their fingers that would show up under exposure to black light, much like the luminol uncovers blood stains on CSI. My husbands' hands were clean. Perhaps because the elves moved themselves? Or perhaps because florescent marker didn't make it to the sides or bottom edges of the lego mat where someone might be likely to grip when lifting?



I expect to be likewise interrogated when I get home. It's a good thing I wasn't a guilty party. We discovered through curious testing though that while florescent marker will readily transfer to human hands on contact from a slick markered surface like a lego mat no matter how many hours it has been there, it is almost impossible to remove it from porous human hands after contact is made. For the record? Water, soap, alcohol, hydrogen peroxide, industrial pumice, Goo Gone, and gasoline will NOT remove florescent marker from skin sufficiently enough to prevent it from showing up under a black light. However, it can be successfully masked by going back over the offending area with a sharpie marker.

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"Spider sense....tingling."

Buffy, that is a great story. Good thing you found a way around that black light check.

I am teaching a group of grade 1's and 2's this year. The grade 2 - 7 year olds kept trying to tell the grade 1's - 6 year olds. That Santa was not real. Had them all upset. But then when I turned around and told them how Santa was not going to bring them presents this year, they would swear up and down that he WAS real. Right on that cusp of believing.

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Don't sweat the petty things and don't pet the sweaty things.