Bye bye lights

We finally put the Christmas tree up last week. After the boys needling me since Halloween, I finally caved and put up the tree.
We have a wonderful fake tree that goes up in minutes - the boys love finding the colour codes branches and watching the building of the tree.
After it's up comes the best part - putting on the lights.

We have in years past given up on the little wee lights - you know the ones - one burns out and the whole string goes, and then you have to painstakingly go through all the teeny bulbs one by one with a replacement, trying to find the one that burned out, and if there's more than one, well you may as well just throw the whole string out, you'll never figure out which ones they are.
So because Matthew liked to pull them out at random, our lights never worked for more than 30 seconds. Then, last year, Chris got the bright idea (yes pun intended) to use indoor/outdoor lights on our tree - The bulbs are a bit bigger, but if one goes out, the rest stay lit, and it's easy to swap out the broken ones. That is what I thought anyway. Seems that Matthew has taken quite a shine (yes pun intended) to these new lights. He can unscrew them, and I keep finding little clusters of 5 or 6 lightbulbs that he has unscrewed and hoarded away, put in his backpack or behind the big green chair (one of his little comfy spots).
Our little tree looks rather sparse, as we don't have any other decorations on it, save for a few strings of unbreakable beads - which the boys broke. Ornaments are just too tempting for Joey, and we found out last year that even the older boys discovered the joy of smashing a red and silver ball or two on the kitchen tile. Other 'fun' ornaments like the musical Tigger found it's way into Matthew's toybox, and all my collectible Coca cola ornaments I have kept for future trees, when the boys don't steal them.

So our pathetic little tree, that even Charlie Brown would take pity on has been up for less than a week, been knocked over twice, and the 3 strings of multicoloured lights are quickly losing lights to pilfering and the boys "swiping" them, throwing them behind the couch, the cabinet, or whatever, and cackling "Ha ha ha - you'll NEVER find them now". Leave it to them to watch Dora and find the antagonist Swiper to be their role model.....

Last night I was sitting enjoying my brand new TV when I heard raucous laughter from the other room. the other room that houses our Christmas tree. I also heard the sound of tinkling glass - rushing into the room to find the boys with my swiffer, unscrewed into 2 batons that they were using to bash the tree and break the lights on it!!

They got sent to bed immediately, despite their pleas that they were going to be good and they weren't going to break the lights anymore......

I had purchased some liquid melatonin from the health food store with the intention of asking Matthews pediatrician about it for Matthew's sleep problems. We had used it once with great results, but I felt guilty about giving it to him without the go ahead from his doctor. Last night though, I had had enough. I gave them BOTH 3 drops in their bedtime drinks (about 1/4 of a single adult dose). Within half an hour they were both sleeping soundly and I looked at the clock - 7:35pm.

I can honestly say, that I have NEVER had all 3 kids asleep by 7:30pm. Melatonin is way cool.



Of course this morning they were both up at 7:15am - and the first thing they did was come downstairs and finish bashing the tree that they were interrupted from last night.

Now our tree has no lights - I took the remaining salvageable lights and packed them back up in a box - much to their dismay - but I cannot take the chance of them doing it again and having Joey eat a piece of broken bulb, or cut himself on it.
Our tree has nothing on it but a string of "unbreakable" red beads (because the gold beads are broken....)

Sounds festive doesn't it?