Tuesday 16 December 2008

You know it's Christmas when...

8.45am

... you walk into a too-quiet sitting room to find your sons looking shifty, and have the following conversation...

Me: "What are you two up to?"

Boy#2: "We. are. Eating. It!"

Boy #1: "No we're not. We're not eating. No, no we're not..."

I glance around the room. There still appear to be cookies on the tree - even on the lower branches. The hare-kare cookies that mysteriously hurled themselves onto the floor overnight and which I prised from small fingers before breakfast to put in the biscuit tin are still there. And there are no rogue chocolate wrappers on the floor.

Me: "What were you eating, Boy #2?" (no point asking his older brother, he's never going to confess)

Boy #1: "Nothing!"

Me: "Boy #2?"

Boy #2: "We. were. not! Not!"

Now I have a dilemma. Boy #2 often uses the positive when he means the negative. As in "Want. to. go. outside." can mean either; 'get me outside now or I will be forced to jump all over your bed in my mucky shoes', or; 'You will no more get me outside than you will get me to chew fish.'

Considering the evidence - no screwed up wrappers, no missing tree cookies - I decide that whilst there is every chance the two have been up to no good, I can't prove it, and move on.

Can you believe that at ages 5 and 3 they already know how to put one past me?


12.45pm

You also know it's Christmas when you have this conversation - which happened seconds after I pressed 'publish post' on the example above...

Boy #1: "Mama? Mama? The string has gone!"

Me: "I beg your pardon?"

Boy #1: "The string! The string has gone!"

Me (This has got to be a string on a tree cookie...); "Well, what happened to it?"

Boy #1: "I don't know."

Me: "Where is it? "

Boy #1: "I don't know."

Me: "How did it come out?"

Boy #1 (You guessed...): "I don't know."

Me: ?"Well, where's the cookie?"

Boy #1: "I don't know... Oh, actually, I do. It's here." (He holds up a sad looking star missing one of it's points and, what do you know, a string).

I gave him the cookie to eat. Bad mistake; there will probably be more strings mysteriously disappearing the next time he feels peckish, but what the hell, it's Christmas, and they are cookies after all.

And at least if he eats them it means I can't...


1.15pm

Can you believe it? 30 seconds after I pressed 'publish' for the second time:

Boy #1: "Another biscuit fell down!"

Enough. This one went in the tin. Does he think I'm stupid, or what?

12 comments:

  1. He's done very well.

    Convinced mummy to bake lots of yummy biscuits AND hang them up where he can see them AND provide sub-standard string (whcih could believeably break)AND have his brother trained to follow the formal line of 'we didn't eat them!'

    He'll either be a politician or an international thief by the age of 30.

    ReplyDelete
  2. So - a criminal either way then, Mud?

    ReplyDelete
  3. I have two sons 18 months apart. They are now 24 and 22, respectively, but your post had me giggling and resonating with the memory of them in years gone by! Thanks!
    In a possible flash-forward scenario, you might enjoy my post today - "Loopy Offspring Home for Christmas".

    ReplyDelete
  4. Heh heh, maybe you need to put some of that dye on the cookies. You know, that special stuff that they catch criminals with. Mwah hah hah hah haaaaaa.

    ReplyDelete
  5. I'd give him top marks for effort!

    ReplyDelete
  6. Ah dear, thank you for giving me (and 15 yr old daughter) a good laugh to start the day. Priceless. And it can only get "better" as they get older.

    ReplyDelete
  7. Katherine, I did enjoy it!

    Jo - would that be the same stuff they put in swimming pools to catch you out if you wee'ed in the water? (I always thought that was an urban myth, btw...?))

    EPM, me too. Which is why he got to eat cookie nb 1...

    Tracey, so true. I will be putty in their hands, no doubt.

    ReplyDelete
  8. Clever little monkeys, aren't they? I think I shall be using the same excuse when all the leftover devils on horseback mysteriously 'disappear' after Christmas lunch...

    ReplyDelete
  9. I reckon, at 8.45am, they'd just agreed to eat some cookies but hadn't started when you walked in. Hence the shifty looks but no evidence.

    ReplyDelete
  10. NVG, I'm going to betray my ignorance here. What exactly ARE devils on horseback? I know what I think they are, but am just not sure...

    GBS - you could well be right. Or, I might just not have spotted it (see my next post, yet to be written...)

    ReplyDelete
  11. No cookies on trees. Check.

    Now if only Jonathan would stop knocking off the bulbs!

    ReplyDelete
  12. You're boys are just fab.
    So very, very funny...I can hear it and picture the scene..snigger!

    ReplyDelete

Go on - you know you want to...