Sittin' With Santa

I love everything about the holidays. My only problem is that I try and cram in as many events as possible in a short period of time. Every year it gets harder and harder because there's never enough time to do all the things I want. And every year those events become traditions and I keep adding more things for us to do and in turn they become new traditions. Hence the reason why my house was decorated for Christmas the day after Halloween. It's my way of making the season last longer.

One of these yearly traditions is to make a trip downtown to see Santa. Like most, I wanted a good picture. And this year I wasn't sure how Ayla would respond to Santa so I prepped her a few days before pictures by taking her to the mall to check out Santa. She was really curious about him so we stopped by to say hi and the first thing she did was give him a hug. Super cute but super scary at the same time. Super cute cause it's Santa, Super scary cause Santa is a stranger. And Ayla has gone up to strangers before and given them hugs and then tries to give them kisses. Apparently she's all about world peace. So yesterday we went downtown to see Santa and both kids did extremely well. Ayla sat on Santa's lap like the good girl she is and Holden was oblivious to it all.

Since this is Holden's 1st Christmas we got a photo of him with Santa all by himself. It was hard to get him to look in the direction of the camera cause he was focused on checking out all the people walking outside. But at the last second he turn his head and gave the biggest smile. It was perfect! Luckily the photographer got the shot cause I missed it.

One of the things we did this year was to search for the Nutcrackers they have spread throughout downown. Well sort of. We saw 4. Our kids don't last long enough to search for all 60 of them. Next year we'll try and see more. Another tradition to add to the list.