He Knows if You've been Bad or Good, so be Good for Goodness Sake!!!

Andrew and I went Christmas shopping Saturday morning and finished up gifts for the kids. I was so excited because I knew they were going to love what we got them. We usually hide all the bags in our master bedroom closet. We were in a hurry to get the stuff put away before the kids came home, so Andrew and I quickly stashed the stuff in the back corner of our closet to deal with later. However I did hide the stuff in a way so if you opened the closet door, you wouldn't immediately see anything. Our closet door has no lock on it, so we locked the bathroom door AND our bedroom door.

Okay, so fast forward to later that night. Zach had just finished up his dinner and went off to play. Mason and Tanner were both asleep and I was getting Taylor her dinner. A while later Zack comes booming down the stairs and tells Taylor he wants to show her something. She said for him to wait until she was done with her dinner, so he sat there quietly and waited for her. Finally he said again, "Come on Taylor I want to show you something upstairs."
(I think you all know by now where this is going....)
So this is our conversation that followed:

ME: "Zach what do you want to show Taylor?"

ZACH: "I don't want to tell you."

ME: "Well, if you don't want to tell your mom, then it's probably something you shouldn't be doing.....Zach, what is it??

At this point, Zach walked across the room to me and lowered his eyes and half crying said those dreadful words, "I snooped." I asked him what he meant. He proceeded to tell me that he went in my room and snooped. My heart just sank.

I took him into the other room and sat down and asked him exactly what he did. He told me that he went into our closet and looked thru all the bags and saw all the presents. I asked him to tell me exactly what he saw and he mentioned 4 specific things. I didn't know how to respond....I was dumbfounded. I sent him up to his room while I tried to process exactly what to do next. I just felt sick because it meant that Christmas was ruined for him. Andrew called me a few minutes later and I told him what happened.

When Andrew got home he talked to Zach and found out that he saw everything and went thru every bag (there were probably 6 or 7 bags of stuff up there, not to mention 2 big rocker video game chairs.) Zach said he got one of his lightsabers and knocked the door key down from the top of the door frame and proceeded to go thru not one, but two locked doors and moved things around so he could go thru the bags.

Trying to keep the Santa story alive, Andrew told Zach that Santa asked us to go buy some things at the store to help him out (luckily, most of the stuff Zach saw was for Taylor and Mason.....I had ordered almost all of Zach's gifts online and they're being shipped.) We told him he's not to say a word to Taylor about anything he saw and Taylor promised she wouldn't ask Zach about it (Taylor was kinda nonchalant about the whole thing....she said she doesn't want to ruin her Christmas.)

So who knows what we do now. It's situations like these when I hate being a parent. Those of you with older kids....when did they figure out the whole Santa thing? We don't know if some of those gifts should now be gifts from Mom and Dad instead of Santa? What would you guys do in this situation? I'm so glad I stopped him though, otherwise Taylor would have seen everything too! What a disaster that would have been!


* A little side note: Like Mother, Like Son..........I don't remember how old I was, but I did almost the exact same thing. I went into my mother's closet for something and saw a large black garbage bag. I looked inside and saw ALL of the presents I asked Santa for. I was SO disappointed. After that experience I knew Santa wasn't real.

Maybe this is karma getting me back!