John Charlie

John Charlie, our resident elf-on-the-shelf is back and he's been so much fun this year.  The kids love finding him each morning.  Charlie can find him in a flash, and usually knows where he is before I do.  Evie always goes first to the place where he was the night before and loves to exclaim, "John Charlie flew away!"  She is pretty good at finding him too, when she gets out of her "I dunno" attitude. :)  He has caused a little bit of trouble (he particularly loves to torment Evie), but I've warned him against causing too much trouble because it worries her so during the day.  One day I came out to find him reading one of the kids' Christmas books up on our bookshelf:

Seems pretty benign, right?  Well this just worried the kids all day, and they were convinced that this was the one book they had really wanted to read that day.  Every time Evie looked up at him, she would get worried again: "Uh OH!  No, no John Charlie.  Dat's Ebie's book!"  Charlie was a bit more forgiving, but as our top bookworm, really didn't like losing access to any reading material.

I made him back off from the kids' stuff for a few days, and they loved seeing him doing silly things like hanging from lights...

...or fishing from a mirror:

Anytime he's doing anything that looks a bit acrobatic (like hanging from the light), it prompts lots of talk about how "John Charlie is a monkey!" from both kids.  Charlie loved it when he was fishing--he told me, "Mom!  John Charlie likes to fish as much as I do!"

Then, the other day, I came out to see John Charlie doing this:

 He had gotten into our nativity and stolen Evie's horsie (really a donkey, but we're going with horse, since she so loves horses right now).  The kids have somehow come up with a system whereby every cow in the world belongs to Charlie and every horse in the world belongs to Evie.  Well, Evie did NOT like John Charlie stealing her horsie (and Charlie was a little peeved about him using his forklift all day).  As soon as breakfast was over, I saw her sneak over to the shelf, shimmy up on the drawer pulls, and sneakily get the horse off the forklift and stick it back in the nativity.  After that, she felt much better about her day. :)

We have so enjoyed John Charlie (despite the fact that he has had little to no impact on the kids' behavior) and are sad to see him leave!