Thursday, December 21, 2017A Warning for Santa
It's not often that I end up happy that I stole a childhood away, but MAN am I glad I ruined all sorts of magical things for Alexis this past summer. I'm going to go ahead and bet that she probably figured out the deal with the fat guy in the red suit a very long time ago, but she wasn't willing to admit to herself that she knew. She kept lying to herself because she badly wanted to believe in magic, but then there was this moment that felt like an opening and ... well, I squashed that magic like a bug.
SPLAT.
I'm so glad I did, though. So far this year I have managed to spectacularly fail at all things magical. I haven't been moving the elf. I mean to every day, but then I forget and -meh-. Mila isn't quite old enough to care and Alexis is just old enough to be over it, so it's all good. I don't need to pretend to be competent at magic.
Even worse than failing at all things elf is the fact that Alexis found my stash. I have a most excellent hiding place for things, but she found it this year. It was an accident and she confessed that she had found it less than 3 hours after it happened, so there's no harm done. I didn't bother to try to talk my way out of things and Alexis chose to ignore the magic-squashiness of it all. I need to get my act together next year, but for now it's fine that Alexis saw all of the things.
While Alexis is completely done with the magic, Mila is just starting to figure it out. She also found one of her hidden gifts, but she's such a space cadet that she'll likely forget that she saw it by the time we get to Christmas. Yes, really. It's partly because of the confusion that Christmas Crazy causes. By the end of the packing and sorting, she decided to supervise my actions. As she was checking my work, she would evaluate each toy and declare it, "So awesome!" and then follow that with, "You should buy this for me!"
She absolutely understood that she didn't get to keep any of the toys and that she should ask for the ones she liked best. Basically, she may think that the thing she found is going to the other kids, so it will be brand new when she opens it in a few days. I'm all good.
But there is magic that she's ready to hug with all of her might. She's been talking about Santa a lot the past few days. She knows he will be coming to visit and that he's going to leave things behind. She super hopes that includes a bike, but it would be okay if it were a baby instead. What really matters is that he will come down the chimney, and WAIT. WHAT'S THAT? He's going to eat cookies?
OH, HELL NO.
Seriously.
Mila has spent the past two days telling me that Santa is coming and then tossing out threats that she fully intends to act on should the fat guy so much as look at a cookie.
She's going to kick him. And yell at him. And put him in jail.
Don't eat the cookies, Santa.
I Always Thought Mornings Were Dumb
There's going to be this window of time where every photo of Mila seems to include some sort of shenanigans. It seems only fair that I somehow document how it went down because, really, she's not a bad kid. She's also not free-range. It's more that she doesn't know how to filter her ideas and SHE IS SO FAST OMG.
She's a bolt of lightning on a hot summer day.
It all seems to go down in the mornings. For a while now, it has been IMPOSSIBLE to get the kid to sleep without me nearby. She has some sort of Mom Detection system installed because she always knows when I have left her side. It takes her between 10-20 minutes to figure it out, which basically means QUICK! IT'S A RACE!
I don't do mornings, for what it's worth. So this concept that I need to move as fast as I can before Mila wakes up is somewhat hilarious. It's like asking a sloth to run a 50 yard dash. I usually make it to the shower before she stumbles in and from there, things can go one of two ways.
There is a 50% chance that Mila will pop a squat in the bathroom and stare at me while I take a shower. Seriously. She just sits on the floor and stares. Quietly. She sits with her hands folded in her lap and silently stares.
And THAT is why we can't have a clear shower curtain. She's giving me a complex.
I'd rather get a complex than the alternative, though. The half of the time that Mila doesn't sit and stare is the half of the time that she goes and finds things to entertain herself. In the past few weeks, that has included lip gloss (twice!), eyeshadow, a permanent marker, undecorating a Christmas tree, and countless other bad ideas.
This morning she pulled a hat trick. She managed to do the sit and stare thing but then took off right around when I grabbed the bottle of conditioner. Before I could rinse, she had unwrapped a Christmas gift and given herself fancy eyebrows.
It couldn't have been more than two minutes. She is THAT fast.
In about 30 years, Mila will tell tale of how her mother used to lock her in a cage every morning. It won't be a lie. It will have been for her own good, though. I'm worried that her next step might involve giving herself a tattoo.
