Our family has a complicated relationship with Santa Claus. Not the big man himself, of course. He's a busy man. Instead, we mostly talk to Harold, whose job lies somewhere between account manager and case worker. Last year, we also met Candy, who is an Elf on the Shelf, but not the spying kind. She's an Elf In Training, and was sent out in the field to observe a family. It's a bit like a residency.
Candy's in the second year of her fieldwork, now, and she's mellowed a bit. She doesn't pull quite as many pranks, and the ones she does pull are less messy. Also she didn't show up until the fifth of December. (Last year she arrived the Saturday after Thanksgiving.)
All this is prologue so you understand our first Christmas miracle, and how I pulled it off.
Christie and I have the Christmas Crud, which mostly just congestion and aches. It's the cold that will not go away. The other night, we were both beat, and we fell asleep right after the kids. That block of time between about 9 and 10 pm is normally our elf time, when we have a quick conference, Christie tells me her plan, and we execute. But we slept through it, and honestly forgot until Thing One asks "Why didn't Candy pull any pranks last night?"
Oh, crap.
Christie, smooth as silk, says, "Well, Harold told me that sometimes an elf will take a night off when she's saving up her magic for something really big the next night." which solves the immediate problem, but creates a new one.
Flash forward to that evening, when Thing One, snuggled up on my lap, looks over at Candy and says, "I really hope her big trick tonight is to bring me a new Wild Kratts episode. One I've never seen before."
My kids don't watch live TV; they watch Roku. And they know which Wild Kratts episodes are on Amazon, which ones are on Netflix, and which ones are on YouTube. They know that the picture quality on YouTube isn't that great, but that it has episodes that aren't anywhere else. They know that the PBS Kids app doesn't have very many episodes, but that it sometimes gets new episodes that aren't streaming anywhere else. So this is not an unreasonable hope. New episodes do just show up on occasion, though not often.
We ended up stringing oversized ribbon around the living room, and slinging Candy in one of them like a hammock. Not very tricksy, but visually impressive, which is often enough for a five year old and an almost three year old.
And then, lying in bed, I remembered the Tivo. Sadly, we don't use it much. I love the interface, but it's not friendly to pre-literate kids, and mine love to drive the remote. Also, their viewing habits have been shaped by Netflix, not broadcast. When they get hooked on a show, they want to watch every episode, then come back to their favorites again and again. And again. And again. Seriously? Again? Yes, again.
But even if they don't watch anything on the Tivo, I still use it. It records the shows that Christie and I would watch together if we watched TV anymore, which we really don't. And when the kids get addicted to a new show that's on one of the few channels we actually get, I set a Season Pass. Last month I took it a step forward and told our household PC to automatically transfer Wild Kratts recordings to the PC for safekeeping. That sounds like it'd be really complicated, but it's literally just a matter of checking a box in the Tivo Desktop software.
I checked, and there was indeed an episode saved on the PC that wasn't available streaming online yet (thanks to the lag between broadcast and streaming that most shows have).
Why, you might wonder, do I save episodes from the Tivo to my PC if we're not going to watch them on the Tivo? Because the Tivo Desktop software lets me convert them for iPhone, iPad, and other portable devices.
Now comes the final piece of the puzzle: Plex. I installed the Plex Media Server on our home PC earlier this year, and ripped some of the kids' favorite movies so we could stream them to the Roku without having to open up the A\V cabinet of blinky lights and buttons that beg to be pushed. And the 'converted for iPad' files that the Tivo Desktop produces are Plex-compatible, provided you change the filenames a bit.
Which is why Candy had a note in her hand that said, "Check the TV", and how the TV had on it a brand new episode of Wild Kratts, one that my kids had never seen before.
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