All Is Calm-ish And Bright

Merry Christmas From the Halls!

Calm-ish and Bright.  It describes life in this house EXACTLY.

Trying to get the boys to behave at this time of year should be a piece of cake, right?  Bribery works wonders, right?  Wrong, wrong, wrong.  "Boys!  If you aren't good Santa won't bring you any presents."  Nope, that doesn't work.  Darn... maybe next year.

We are a Christian family and have been teaching the boys about the first Christmas and baby Jesus.  They love reading the Christmas story books that we have, and I really wanted to get them their very own nativity scene since the one that is on our entry way table is a "no touch" one.

I headed out to a local Christian bookstore and found the Little People Nativity Scene!  It's a bit difficult to track down.  AND, it was on sale!  Score.

The boys were really excited to get it.  I was afraid that the "newness" would wear off, but a week later they still love playing with it.  There is only one problem... they both want to play with it at exactly the same time.  And they don't always get the concept of playing together.  So, instead of a calm play session learning about baby Jesus, Mary, Joseph and the wise men, we have a chaotic scene that looks like this...

Boys, seriously.  What would Jesus do?  Ugh.

At least these days we have gotten over the tug of war with the manger.  Now it's a debate over what goes on top of the manager.  Braden insists the angel goes up there while Logan prefers the camel to be up there.  We have a lot of melt downs over a camel being on top of the manger.  Gee, there is something I never thought I'd say.

Last week, my closest friend had a baby.  I showed the boys her picture and they now refer to her as baby Jesus.  I guess they were paying attention during all of our talks about Christmas.  There is no convincing them that it's baby Lily and not baby Jesus.  To make things more confusing, we shipped them a box of Christmas gifts yesterday, so now Braden thinks that we sent Baby Jesus presents because it is His birthday.  How do you argue with that?