Thursday Shenanigans

On this rainy, dreary, inside morning I was in the kitchen making pancakes while the girls, who were supposed to be getting dressed, were arguing in the living room. I heard Sophie shouting "Ellie, you take me off that list right now!" so I went to investigate. I found Ellie prancing around with the following paper and taunting her sisters:


I confiscated it like a good teacher, but I couldn't help giggling at Eleanor's phonetic spelling of "crimnuls", "cuoot" and "jooleu". What a stinker.

Sophie, in her never-ending quest to master every bit of information the world has to offer about horses, immediately went back to her reading about horse evolution and telling me at great length what a shame it is that those tiny rabbit-sized horse ancestors in her book are now extinct so we can't get one.

Meanwhile, Anna and Julia were in the kitchen squabbling over their favorite toy oven rack. Anna won, of course, but Julia is learning to fight back and I'm sure will soon become a force to be reckoned with.

My Children are Not being nice

We have never done Santa Claus at our house (I have no problems with people who do, we just didn't ever get that started.) My kids know all about Santa, but we don't make believe presents come from Santa, they just come from whoever they're from, mostly mom and dad.

So, up until this year there has never been a "better be good so you can get Christmas presents" thing going around. This year it's all changed because the little girls watched a stupid Christmas show about these weird bug-eyed fairies that work for Santa and go around watching to see who should be on the "naughty" list and who should be on the "nice" list. This has become a constant theme with them, and they have several lists they've been carrying around and working on and using to manipulate each other.

Ellie's list is a bunch of jumbled letters that only she can read, but Sophie's reads "Margaret, Sophie, Ellie, Anna, Penny, Sparkey, Maggie" with a checked box by each one. This is her "nice" list and anytime anyone does something she doesn't like she x's out their check mark. Once she's happy with them again she re-checks the box. The paper is getting crumpled and thin as she removes and reinstates her siblings over and over again. All day long I've been listening to "Margaret is on my naughty list, no presents for her!" and "Anna is so good, see, she's on the nice list" and so on and so forth.

'Tis the Season to tattle, I guess. Sigh.