The Innocence of Children

These two little children look so angelic and innocent, don't they? And yet....they keep me awfully busy jumping through hoops with their new quirks and adjusting to their new ways to get into trouble! This month, I have found:

An entire box of Kleenex emptied to give the "Bell Tree" a blanket and pillow for bedtime (which Kennedy assured me Maddox had done, because apparently he's a lot more thoughtful to our decorations that I knew, plus being much NEATER than I've ever seen evidence of).

The contents of our fridge and freezer emptied and placed in a straight line across our kitchen and family room (which OCD Kennedy also assured me Maddox had done...even though he was staring at the line of items in complete fascination with me)

And then I found all the presents under the Christmas tree opened two weeks before Christmas, in the 5 minutes I ran upstairs to change my clothes and brush my teeth. When Maddox walked into my bathroom holding a toy fire truck, Kennedy said, "I was in the other room, watching a movie." I had no idea what she was talking about or what had even happened yet at this point, and when the thought Maddox might have opened one of his Christmas presents entered my mind, I started to go downstairs, but Kennedy told me she wanted to stay upstairs for awhile (to avoid my wrath, no doubt), which made me even more nervous and I rushed downstairs to find this:

Actually, it was worse than the pictures because I had already started cleaning and organizing when I took them, but when I got downstairs it looked like a tornado had gone through our presents. Every single gift was ripped open into a huge mess of toys, tissue paper, ripped boxes, and wrapping paper bits everywhere. Whole gift boxes were literally ripped in half. And as to Maddox doing it all by himself, all the girl toys were piled in a corner hiding behind a chair. Hmmm. Now, while I have no doubt Maddox was INVOLVED in this one, since only he is strong enough to pull a toy fire truck completely free from its box (even ripping out the screws holding it in place and all), I have a feeling Kennedy once again initiated this little activity, because Maddox is just not that proactive (or devious, actually).

To say I was angry is quite the understatement of the year. The children are lucky that we were on our way for an appointment to visit a friend, or they might have been skinned alive immediately. When I called Milt and told him what had happened, he told me to just stop cleaning and take a picture because it would be funny later (I'm still kind of waiting), and that he would re-wrap the gifts when he got home. I had to at least get the presents hidden before McKinley got home though, and figuring out who each present was from and who it was for took most of my detective skills because I had to search for the pieces of wrapping that fit each item, and then find the tag that matched (often which was on another piece of paper somewhere). I felt like I was on a really boring episode of CSI. Luckily, there were only about 20 presents under the tree at the time, and about half of them were clothes and pajamas (my favorite kind of presents!), so at least I knew by sizes who they were for.

The best part of all this is that when Milt re-wrapped the presents back together using whatever wrapping paper bits he found on the floor, Kennedy's sense of all things "right" was horribly offended, and she kept saying, "no, no, that's not right" when she'd see a disfigured wrapping job. I figure it was pretty good payback, because having patchwork-wrapped presents seemed really disturbing to her OCD-ness. And don't worry, we decided to wait to put most of the presents back under the tree until Christmas Eve, just to be safe.

And next time I go upstairs for a few minutes? I think I'm going to put the children in their "bins" while I go (not that they'd stay there for long), just to give me some piece of mind for a few minutes!