Wrapping the Gifts

My boys and Maia Louise like to help with just about everything I am doing and wrapping Christmas gifts is no exception. I like to do it on the floor where I can spread out and have enough room for all the gifts and everything needed to turn them into beautiful presents, but that just gives the little ones an open invitation to get overly involved in every aspect of the job. Edison is a very good boy who steps gingerly around the packages and over the papers and bows, watching from a few feet away and occasionally getting into my lap to sniff something that has caught his eye. Bram and Maia Louise, however, stomp on and through everything, climbing into bags and boxes, crunching the wrapping paper, eating the bows and then tearing off the lower branches of the tree and eating those for dessert.

This year I had to rewrap several gifts before they had even made it under the tree, courtesy of those two. This is our first Christmas with Brammy-doodle but given his penchant for nonstop nonsense (since his first moment here with us) I expected him to be somewhat out of control come the holidays, but I didn't think he would open the gifts as soon as I wrapped them. He simply can't wait for Christmas morning, and he doesn't seem to care who the gift is actually for, he just wants to see what's inside the paper and after tearing one open and getting a good look at what lay within, will move immediately on to the next. Maia, who was also a terror in her youth, seems to have had her wild ways revived by Brammo's maniacal behavior and is once again, despite her advancing age, tearing into everyone's gifts.

When I finally managed to get far enough ahead of the destruction and finished wrapping all the presents that had been bought to date, Bram decided to eat the gift tags on many of them, some of which were found under the couch, some licked clean and sporting tears and itty bitty tooth holes but still attached to their gifts. And if there had been any doubt as to who had done this, Bram was the only one in the house whose tiny mouth was covered in pretty light-catching glitter.

So now there is no admittance into the living room without human supervision. We have French doors on two sides of the room, so even with it closed up we can still (sort of) see our lovely tree and if we want to visit it, a close eye needs to be kept on two certain small animals with a penchant for good-natured destruction. It's going to be a very merry Christmas if I can keep Bram and Maia Louise away from the tree for just a little bit longer.