Elias, Santa Claus and the Wii game

At dinner tonight, Elias said, "Mom, Jeremy says that Santa Claus isn't real."

He kind of stuttered along at first and Jeremy's mom had told me that Jeremy knew the truth, so I was totally prepared with, "Yes, he is real."

Then, Elias continued, "He says that HIS DAD said that his parents just hide the gifts and put them under the tree themselves."

Now, I think it's probably about time Elias stopped believing. But what I couldn't believe is that he was saying it in front of Ezra--and Ezra was looking at me expectantly. I shot Elias a dirty look.

I think, for once in his life, he actually took a hint and he changed the subject.

Now, how to broach the subject again? And will he immediately tell Ezra?

I don't quite get why he was bringing this up anyway...Friday, I got an email from Elias' teacher informing me that Elias had hit another student and that he has been doing it a lot the past couple of weeks. It was never in anger; this time, they had been playing during free time and ten minutes later, in the bus line, Elias was still raring to play and hit the boy in the back. So, I broke the fighting game that he's been playing on the Wii. I figure that is just punishment.

Oh, it broke Ezra's heart. He cried, no exaggeration, for an hour. I felt really bad for him because it's his favorite game. I would finally get him calmed down a bit and he would look at me and just start boohooing all over again. He kept asking for super glue to glue it back together.

After a good, long cry, Elias came in and announced that he didn't really care that I'd broken the game because he was going to email Santa Claus and ask him to bring them another game. *shocked*

So, because Jeremy had already told him ~*the truth*~, either he was saying that for Ezra's benefit (good big brother) or he was trying to prove to me that he cared not a bit that I had broken the game. (Whatever the reason, Ezra stopped his hysterics.)

I'm sure my eyes became slits and I spoke through my teeth, "Santa would NOT bring you that game and if he did, it would go IMMEDIATELY back into the trash anyway!"

Later, he emailed Santa a list of things that he wanted.

can i please have an ipod nano and a spy kit thank you. Elias

I'm so relieved he wrote "thank you" this time because last November, I had to have a talk with him about demanding gifts from Santa.

In happier news, he read a whole "Magic Tree House" book in under an hour this evening. I told him it was time to move on to harder books but he just looked at me like, "Yeah, right."