The Ongoing Adventures of Rosie Peppermint

What's up, Christmas fans.

The arrival of Rosie Peppermint - November of 2017.

So I don't think I mentioned this to you folks before, but we got the girls one of those Elf on the Shelf thingies towards the end of November last year.  Kris and I had debated it for a couple years, back when they first came out and Alayna was, like, three years old, but then said 'that's stupid, let's not do that.'  A few years passed and the girls didn't say anything, and Kris and I were both grateful.

Because Elf on the Shelf IS stupid.

Well, for the last three years or so, since we've been back up here in Michigan, Alayna and Abby both started asking about it.  For the first two years, we were able to brush it off - fortunately the girls were more curious than interested - but last year they really started bugging us about it.  It was really aggravating, because Alayna - at nine years old - was almost to that age where that stuff is no longer going to be believable - but we eventually relented, bit the bullet, and bought a damn Elf.

Rosie's "Birthday Party."

We let the girls unwrap it one evening after school, and they were both super-excited.  They threw their Elf - a female (yes, you can choose its gender) they christened 'Rosie Peppermint' - a birthday party, and later that night after they went to bed, Kris and I started the long, arduous process of putting the Elf in all kinds of compromising situations.

What sucks about this whole damn process is that you have to constantly place the Elf somewhere different, and doing different things, and all the time raising the elaboration of it all.  Kris scopes out Pinterest constantly, because all sorts of lame-ass parents post their stuff to Pinterest, and both of our Facebook feeds are filled with parent friends who upload their own Elf exploits so the entire world can know how f***ing cool they are.

I've had to develop an entirely new handwriting style for Rosie, as it couldn't match the existing handwriting styles I've created for Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, and the Tooth Fairy.

I hate people.

Anyway, not to be hypocritical or anything, but here's some of the shit we came up with last year (at least I'm not uploading it to social media.)  We had to run this gauntlet for nearly thirty days last year, and this year - starting today - we're going to repeat the process.  We can't do any of the previous twenty-seven things, so Kris and I are both really looking forward to scraping up new ideas for this stupid, waste of time.

Happy Holidays. . .

(We forgot until the last minute.  These lame-ass poses happened frequently.)

We occasionally had to leave clues like this so our kids knew where the thing was. . .

The running joke around these parts is that our elf has a sweet tooth, which the girls find hilarious.

This was 'warming up by the fire' after her adventure in the freezer.

(This one was my idea.)

Following a day where the girls had been fighting with one another like crazy, we staged an inter-mythical creature capture (note the change in handwriting - appreciate the hell out of that, America.)  The point of the whole Elf on the Shelf thing (so I'm told) is that it 'watches' your kids to make sure they remain on their best behavior for S. Claus.  That's extremely creepy.

Kris came up with the Minions thing.  (I drew the dead Minions.  Just in case you were curious.)

We hung up a bunch of the girls underwear all over the Christmas Tree.  Just 'cause.

On the night before Christmas Eve, for Rosie's second-to-last act of the season, we went big.  Abby had been asking Rosie for a Scavenger Hunt (seriously), which is always a total bitch to set up (have you seen our Easter mornings around here?)

. . . aaaand now we have to jump through all the damn hoops all over again.  The second my kids stop believing in all this Elf crap, I'm going to take Rosie outside in the bonfire pit and set her on fire.

- Brian

Fat Season

You know, it's some unspoken rule in our house that stipulates that any given day throughout the year, we have to have a ridiculous amount of junk food on hand.

And for the life of me, I have no idea why.

It's not like we really get down on the whole junk food thing, either; Kris doesn't eat a lot of sweets (besides chocolates, mind you), and I try to watch my caloric intake as much as humanly possible (as I hate exercising just as much as I hate Tina Fey... which is a lot).  We even monitor our kids' intake of sweets probably moreso than other parents, if only because our kids taken to sugar like sharks in a feeding frenzy.  Yet despite our indifference/staunch opposition to the food group, we seem to constantly have an abundance of it around the house.

I blame holidays.

It starts around Halloween, with Halloween cookies and Trick or Treat candy, etc.  Just as you're coming off the tail-end of 'leftover season' with that whole ordeal, you're blindsided with Thanksgiving, which - while not having cookies or candy, as it were - still features more than it's fair share of deserts.  We're not huge fans of Thanksgiving (who can blame us), but we still celebrate it as best we can, and that means buying sugary crap we usually pass up on.

'Cause we're stupid.

Which brings us to Round Three:  Christmas.  Thanksgiving, as we all know, is more or less the kick-off for this season, which, by my calculations, is now approximately four months long.  This means that, starting in late November, one can expect a dramatic increase in chocolates, candy canes, fruit cakes, and cookie imports.

If you're on a diet, this is Hell Season.

For Yours Truly, this is indeed a bad couple of months.  While not necessarily having a 'sweet tooth,' I do fancy myself a holiday cordial, Christmas liqueur, or - probably most significantly - an egg nog or six on a regular basis throughout the season.

Egg nog may be the greatest-tasting flavor on Earth, which is why they only release it once a year, for a measely five or six weeks, and why it consequently has about 700 calories per 1/2 cup serving.

That might be an exageration, but I'm not off by much.

Anyway, like I was saying, Christmas is Hell in sugar-form, and once you've gained your Holiday Weight at the end of the season, you have about two or three weeks of sweating out all the access sugar before Valentine's Day rears it's red, sugary head and barrels down upon you.  Then there's St. Patrick's Day, and all the green beer you can stomach. . .

A vicious cycle, which I could continue to spell out for you, but I'm going to cut 'er off here and show you some bizarre Christmas Cookie pictures instead.

Enjoy.

Our kids. 'Helping'

Eating some of Grandma Jordan's famous Peanut Butter Fudge

Will someone PLEASE buy my wife a rolling pin?

Breaking out the cookie cutters

One big ball of dough.

Baking.

Rushing through dinner in order to take part in the decorating process. . .

May this poor excuse for a Santa cookie haunt your dreams. . .

Those are supposed to be buttons on the snow man's front, but the black icing was really runny. . . so instead it looks like someone gave the poor guy a Cleveland Steamer.

SPRINKLES.

Not impressed.

Abby never completely got the hang of this. . .

I'm pretty terrible at this.

There must be some pre-school mantra out there that dictates that the more sprinkles a cookie has, the better it is.

This year's finished batch.  Not quite the thing of legend, if truth be told.

- Brian