Be Good for Goodness Sake!

During a recent bout of insomnia, I got the good idea to bake gingerbread men. Mostly I wanted to have a cookie-decorating party, but also - what else is there to do at three o'clock in the morning? And then I got the even better idea to poke a skewer through the gingerbrains of a dozen of those little critters and string them with a bit of ribbon so I could hang them on our Christmas tree.

Which I hadn't put up yet. Dang. So I also did that. But really - what else is there to do at five o'clock in the morning?

By the time I had the furniture rearranged and the tree decorated and the place tidied up again, it wasn't so early anymore. Small Fry came downstairs. I set down my seventeenth cup of coffee of the day and assumed a defensive crouch.

7:53am: Small Fry gasps and runs over to stand, starry-eyed, in front of the tree. A misguided "Oh, he's so sweet! I should get the camera" synapse fires in my brain.

7:53:10am: I reach up my nose with an ornament hook and rip that idiotic neuron out at the roots.

7:53:20am: Small Fry throws his arms open and exclaims, "I love it!" ... and leaves the tree completely alone.

No word of a lie. He didn't touch it at all. Not with a dinosaur, not with his eyeballs, not even with his nipples. What a difference from last year! This year's tree didn't require one iota of parental management.

Um, sorry, camera-neuron. Guess that was a little rash of me.

But then tonight I looked over and saw this:

 and this:

and this:

And yes, I put up a fake tree this year, but that's not the point so quit judging me. The point is, those are tooth marks. Small Fry has been nibbling on my sweet little defenseless gingerbabies in situ, like so many endangered albatross chicks or something. 

I no longer have a collection of adorable, homemade keepsake ornaments: I am the proprietor of a retirement community for gingerbread amputees. Not to mention, the mother of a rather devious Christmas-tree-worshipping pagan with possible cannibalistic tendencies. *sigh* Merry Christmas to me.