Stuck in Korea

Well it's not Monday anymore, so the mood's lifted. Plus they now know the song from five gold rings to the partridge, but everything from six upwards is of no interest to them - it's just a countdown to the gold rings bit so they impatiently mumble until they get to the good stuff, as it were.

I stumbled across a beautiful method of child control yesterday. Last year I told the kids that Santa was my friend and that incurring my wrath would end up with their Christmas presents being redirected to North Korea. This year I've gone a little further...

My father, God bless him, has a big bushy white beard. Show the kids one photo of him, tell them (truthfully) that he's my dad and (not quite so truthfully) that he's the one and only Santa Claus et voila! The most sweet little cherubs in the world. Of course I had to pretend to phone him yesterday and tell him that the kids had been misbehaving (which they had at the time), which produced expressions of pure horror on the nippers' faces. I imagine that's the sort of face I'd pull if I was about to have my gonads mangled by a steamroller. Today all I had to do was show them my mobile phone and they all quietened down. Magic. Pure magic.

Unfortunately every moment of their spare time today has also been spent making paper things, which are then given to me with instructions that they're to be presented to my dad. Little suck ups. I now have about half a kilo of hastily created paper gifts lying on my table which they are expecting me to send to my dad later - they think he lives in Edinburgh Castle (now known as Castle Santa) - I had a photo of it handy so I just went with it. Does a sheet of coloured paper folded in half classify as a gift? If so, would you really want to give it to Santa? What are you hoping he'll give you in return? Don't think it's quite enough to get you that PS2, kids.

Half a kilo of paper on the second day of my Santa deception. This may get out of hand long before Christmas arrives.