An Elf Story

This is the first year we've done the Elf on a Shelf thing. Our elf, Charles Herbert, has gotten into our candy canes,

and put on a puppet show for the action figures.

I was having fun with it until Braden told me one morning that he lay awake in bed in the middle of the night, having to pee, but too afraid to get up because there was an elf moving around somewhere in the house, and it was too creepy. Here I thought that my eight-year-old knew that it was just me posing the elf. I explained it all, and the kids agreed to take turns with the posing from then on.

Brooklyn and London had the army men tie the elf to the train tracks.

 It was quite a setup.

But Preston had the elf exact revenge by bulldozing their village the next night.

One night he even got into the brownies.

It was all going well, until Mom's Meltdown. The kids pushed one too many of Carol's buttons, just the  last of which was this:

All of this was on the floor in the t.v. room, and was supposed to have been put away, but instead I found it had been put in the couch. And when I say in the couch, I mean IN THE COUCH. Shoved inside a hole under the cushion.

So, last night Charles Herbert wrote a farewell letter, and is heading back to the North Pole. 

His handwriting looks amazingly similar to mine.