Thank you for all of the positive feedback on our parenting skills\u2026 you all know who you are! There was one snarky anonymous (of course) comment on the Santa post last night, so we disabled comments altogether. We have a blog for our family and closest friends, and I\u2019m really thinking about going private again because whoever you are, even though you see a scrapbook of our kids\u2019 lives, you don\u2019t know Mike or me, and you don\u2019t know my children. I\u2019m happy to share the love that we have with you and maybe some ideas along the way, but you have no right to judge us because you don\u2019t have context\u2026 you don\u2019t live our story. I wasn\u2019t even going to say that much, so I\u2019ll leave it at that.<\/p>\n
For further clarification, it was all we could do to make it through Christmas believing in Santa this year. As Noelle\u2019s parents, we wanted her to believe in Santa as long as she wanted to, and as long as it was fun for her. She came to us daily and asked us detailed questions and she begged us to stop talking in riddles. She was continually frustrated that we wouldn\u2019t just say \u201cyes\u201d or \u201cno\u201d to the big question that kept being asked. I refuse to blatantly lie to my girl, so I never gave her a straight answer (which the other half of the crowd thinks is probably wrong that I didn\u2019t come right out and answer her the first times she asked). It was no longer fun for her, and it wasn\u2019t fair to her not to know the difference between real and pretend. She was begging us to tell her the truth. It was breaking our hearts just to get through Christmas. She was exasperated. Truly. Noelle deserved to know the truth.<\/p>\n
I asked Noelle this morning if she is happy that we told her the truth about Santa and this was her answer, word for word, \u201cI\u2019m happy you told me the truth about Santa because I misunderstood who brought me my presents, whether it was you guys or Santa. Now I know who to thank!\u201d I\u2019m not even kidding you, that\u2019s what she said. She\u2019s happy, healthy, responsible, and so excited and already looking forward to being sneaky with us next year (she gets WAY more pleasure out of giving than receiving, so this will be right up her alley)\u2026 hopefully she\u2019ll remember Santa as a little childhood game that\u2019s lighthearted and fun\u2026 so we\u2019re good!<\/p>\n
On anther note, kids are so impressionable at this age, they are trying to figure out who they are and what they believe, and if we out right lied to her about Santa, how could she believe us when we tell her the truth about Jesus? We would have no credibility and rightly so. We want our yes to be yes and our no to be no. She\u2019s trying to figure out the world around her and needs us to be honest and trustworthy. Those character qualities are much more important to us than believing in something that is not real.<\/p>\n
*Now that all that heavy stuff is out of the way, I\u2019m pretty sure Anna Kate will never question the validity of Santa and roll with it until she\u2019s 16, and then be all like, \u201cOh, I get it! That\u2019s silly!\u201d but if she asks over and over again, I\u2019m not going to leave her frustrated. That\u2019s not fair. Each child is so different, so it will be interesting to see how that unfolds. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Thank you for all of the positive feedback on our parenting skills\u2026 you all know who you are! There was one snarky anonymous (of course) comment on the Santa post last night, so we disabled comments altogether. We have a blog for our family and closest friends, and I\u2019m really thinking about going private again […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pondfam.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17774"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pondfam.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pondfam.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pondfam.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pondfam.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=17774"}],"version-history":[{"count":11,"href":"https:\/\/www.pondfam.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17774\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":17789,"href":"https:\/\/www.pondfam.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17774\/revisions\/17789"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pondfam.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=17774"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pondfam.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=17774"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pondfam.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=17774"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}