Dear sleep, I mean Santa,

We know we’ve had our problems the last year but we’d love to explain. We’re assuming we have secured a spot on the naughty list after overusing your name as a new found parenting tactic. We’ve found that parenting is a constant battle between balancing teaching moments and bribery. Your naughty/nice reward system is a good addition to our current Love and Logic technique that is occasionally accompanied with the Whisper Scream method. To put this in real life perspective, you are rocking a tired baby to sleep while trying to calmly and quietly talk a toddler through a meltdown about cereal. Why wouldn’t the Cheerios need milk the very second the baby finally closes his eyes? To a toddler with no perspective of time, no matter how nicely you explain that you will get the milk in just a minute, to them it means they will never ever get cereal. The stress of these dramatic moments can quickly turn calm and quiet into whisper screams and when that doesn’t work our new ‘Santa tactic’ could normally stop the tantrum.

Your name has become an excuse to put off buying every dinosaur or robot seen and encouraging good behavior in times of desperation. We found this method very effective long before Christmas which has understandably made it difficult for Creed to believe if we were telling the truth about Santa. In these moments of doubt, it seemed fitting to make a fake phone call to the North Pole to turn up Creed’s claus-o-meter. I mean really, if you haven’t had a pretend phone call with Santa in front of your kids, you should! The fake phone calls quickly needed a voice, so please forgive Papa Greg for being an imposter. During a ‘Santa Claus’ conversation, over hearing about how good Creed had been all year made us wonder what version of Creed Santa had seen. No milk in his cereal bowl, naughty list! A milky bowl of cereal, nice list! When you arrive at our house, whether it is with a bag full of toys or lumps of coal we’ll have your cookies ready and yes, if we haven’t used all the milk for the cereal we will leave a glass of milk out too.

Before you come in, remember that we have another milk drinker in the house, Truett! As much as I believe in you, I equally believe that he could drink you under the table, or should I say down a chimney. You may have officially met your match, possibly your replacement. He seems to meet all the qualifications, good at pulling all-nighters, milk guzzler, and can make his belly bounce when he giggles.

To ‘wrap up’ our defense, whether or not our family name made it on the nice list or not, we have plans in place to help secure our spot next year. We will continue to learn more about love, patience, and kindness. While we work to relearn the words that have lost their meaning this year: sleep, hurry, clean and quiet. We will try to use our most frequently used words less: no, more coffee, and our newfound cussword replacements!

Our year has been hectic but happy! We feel incredibly blessed and are looking forward to more sleep as well as whatever life has in store for us in 2019!

P.S. – Creed wanted you to know that if you need to take a bathroom break you can use his big boy potty. You can’t make this stuff up, Santa!

All our love,

Truett, Creed, Alec & Nichole