Why Fly Solo when Elves can Help?!?

"God Grant all, in this House....

A Very Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!"

A random song that Sam brought to our marriage

Two Christmas experiences have reaffirmed to me the brilliance of having children...when you train and teach them properly, you have elves on hand to make your Christmas less stressful and more delightful!

The night before the last day of school before Christmas break (got that?) is always a hectic one, at least at my house. We're trying to get teacher gifts put together, treats made for school parties, token gifts for friends, etc, etc. I ran out of time that night to make the treats for one class party so I got up at 5:00 AM to complete the task. I actually enjoy making Christmas goodies but 5AM was a little much. Everyone else was sleeping which was peaceful but I quickly realized it was not the most advantageous.

I was making these delicious little bites...

They are simple, once you get all the busy work out of the way. You place a chocolate kiss on top of a pretzel, put them in a 200 degree oven for five minutes, take them out and place a M&M candy on top and push down. Let cool. Amazingly simple and completely yummy.

However, the part I wasn't planning on was all the prep work.

1. Lay out all the pretzels

2. Unwrap all chocolate kisses

3. Sort through a normal bag of M&Ms to get all the red, green and yellow M&Ms (cause we couldn't find any holiday candies)

My little people are the perfect candidates for jobs that involve patterns or repetition. But alas, it was 5AM and they were all sleeping. So, the perfect little treat that hardly takes any time at all, took me triple time, at least, because nobody was there to do the monotonous tasks that bug me.

Fast forward to last night. It was 11PM and I just finished writing and printing the Christmas letter to go with our annual Christmas card. I was set on them going out today so I needed to finish them last night. I recruited all willing and available subjects which ended up being three of my children. Why were they still up? Birthday party night!

This guy had the stuff all the cards in the envelope job. After a few pointers, he took off stuffing and didn't stop!

I put this lady to work stamping all of the envelopes. What a great job for a 4 year old!

And this truly remarkable young woman put on all the address labels and return address labels for me and finished the stamping job above when little lady faded.

While these three took care of their duties, I signed and folded each letter to add to an envelope. What would have taken me 4-5 hours alone was trimmed to 1 hour 30 minutes and all 135 Christmas cards were in the mail box this morning. 

Lesson Learned: Sometimes you think it's faster to just do it yourself. But is it really?? Sure you may have some peace and quiet (or not), but you miss out on conversation, bonding, developing skills with your children, and listening in on your daughter's phone conversation!!!! Why fly solo when elves can help out?!?

More to Come...but until then, Stick-to-it!