Scary Santa

As you may have noticed, we have had a little trouble keeping up with the blog lately. This has been due to the general craziness that is the life of the Molloy family. First Marty and I were sick at a time when we were both completely overloaded at work, which happened to coincide with Thanksgiving festivities. For whatever reason this seemed like a great time to hire a contractor to begin the renovation of our bathroom, which left us with no shower for three weeks, dust and grime covering every surface in our entire house, banging and constructing (which does not allow for peaceful nap times for children) all day for weeks and an additional level of chaos to our already hectic lives. Then as things seemed to be calming down, Lucas got really sick with a high fever and severe congestion. Poor thing could barely breath and was spending way too much time being wide awake and miserable in the middle of the night.

Well, things seem to slowly be getting back to "normal" just in time for the holidays, so hopefully it will continue this way! Speaking of the Holiday, again this year, Elise seems to have a completely irrational fear of Santa Clause. Now, I know that a lot of children are scared of Santa, but her fear goes way beyond being freaked out about sitting on the bearded stranger's lap in a mall (and I don't blame kids for being scared of that!). She is actually terrified about his proclivity for breaking and entering.

Again this year, she says to us with alarm "Is Santa going to come into our HOUSE?" in a way that makes it sound like it a band of armed, masked, drunken thieves that were going to storm our property. Marty tried to calm her fears by explaining that Santa just pops in, drops off gifts (how could you be scared of presents?!) and then moves along to the next house. It's a very fast, non-invasive process! But she continues to freak out. "Is Santa going to come into my ROOM?" she asks, wide eyed and terrified. Sigh. I told this to the Director at Ellie's school and she said that I should see it as a good thing that Elise is cautious of strange men coming into her house or room at night. Ok, yes, I suppose it is good to be a wary of strangers, but seriously what three year old worries about Santa breaking and entering into their room at night?

So Santa was scheduled to visit her classroom on Friday and Elise had been fretting about it for days. Why did he have to come?! Did she have to talk to him? Was she going to have to be in the same room as him?! It just can't be healthy to have that much anxiety as a three year old. We did our best to calm her down about the Santa situation, gently nudged her to go to school anyway, and warned the teachers that she was completely freaked out by this whole situation.

So imagine our surprise when we picked Elise up on Friday afternoon with a report that she not only had no problems seeing Santa (never complained or said a thing about it) but she actually went up - voluntarily - and sat on his lap!! The mystery of this 180 degree turn around in behavior was solved when it was revealed that Santa was giving out candy canes to kids when they sat on his lap. Hmmm. Maybe our little girl is not as street smart about strangers as we once suspected. But hopefully the candy cane incident will quell any lingering terror she holds about Santa bum-rushing our house.