SANTA! I know him!
Last year, Lily finally got the whole Santa thing about the end of the season. I think it really clicked when she woke up Christmas morning and her mermaid had arrived, along with several other fun things. This year, she needed no reminding, and when Old St. Nick made his stop at Wal-Mart this weekend, I took the chance to take the kids to tell Santa all their hopes for Christmas.(Plus, having some connections, I wouldn't have to deal with ridiculous mall picture prices and less-than-ideal scanned pictures. YAY!!!)
As soon as Lily saw him, she ran right up to him, jumped in his lap, and gave this complete stranger the biggest hug EVER! (Stranger danger? What's that?) Luckily there wasn't a line because I can almost guarantee that would have happened even if there had been 10 kids in front of her. Ok...maybe not. But the girl was thrilled to be there.They chatted for a few minutes and I heard "bike" in there somewhere. So I think we're still ok on that front. Unlike last year when we had no idea she wanted a mermaid until we hit up Santa closer to Christmas. After all our shopping was done, of course. And with few mermaids to be found. But Santa managed to pull that out of his bag of tricks some how.
Once she was done, I went to hand Timothy to Santa. And I hadn't even held him out yet. For all he knew, I was changing hips. But he did know and started crying and promptly hid his head in my shoulder. A little disappointed, I figured we'd forgo his Santa picture this year rather than torture the poor kid. If anything, we would have a story about why there's no picture of Timothy with Santa in 2011. But when Erik could break away from actual work, he decided every kid should have at least one sad Santa picture and this was Timothy's year.
So here they are...both ends of the Santa-loving spectrum...
Santa was a real trooper; you wouldn't know from his smile that the child on his lap is screaming! Poor Timothy! They are both adorable, for sure!