First santa visit

His christmas sweater we found at the thrift store.  I LOVE a good bargain!

I feel like andrew deserves a post so here it is.  We had our first visit to santa this year.  Last year, he was only 6 months old and the flu was going around like wildfire.  We choose to forgo santa pictures and maybe spare all of us illness.  This year we had picked the santa that comes to the union hall to be our goal santa.  He was very nice, super friendly and there were no high pressure lines.  The kids got cookies and a toy and got to play around santa as long as they wanted to.  We felt like it was a win win situation.  We could gradually introduce our son to the jolly old man with little to no pressure.

This probably should have been our first clue that this wasn't going to work.  When we walked in, my social child turned into a hiding shy child immediately.  What the heck, we socialized him like crazy when he was a puppy, er I mean baby.  

He eventually did warm up and did watch another little girl sit on santa's lap.  We thought maybe he was ready to go up and meet St. Nick.  

St.  Nick had a super cool pocket watch.  At first this interested andrew and we thought, wow, this is going to work!

He seemed surprised as daddy let go and put him in Santa's lap.  That quickly changed......

To full on crying and screaming.  Well, in his defense, I never did socialize him with santas so maybe the fault is mine.  

Afterwards we played the "look at that" game.  Yes, I played a game usually for dogs with my toddler.  I was hoping to minimize the damage I had done on my child by putting him on a stranger's lap and walking away.  He got to play for quite a while on the dance floor with other kids in front of santa but he never got the courage up to revisit him.  Santa was super nice and gave andrew a couple of board books.  Andrew had a couple of the cookies that they had and some juice.  He also got to chase/dance with several of the cutest little girls ever.  We will have a ladies man on our hands in the very near future I do believe.  

After santa we had lunch at our most favorite place ever in Topeka, Juli's coffee shop.  Andrew was more about the cheetos than the grilled cheese but at least he ate some thing.  We both had bowls of chili, mine the white and tony the red bean.  They were both amazingly good as always.  We headed out to join the craziness that is the christmas shopping crowd.  I am proud to say in one trip, we got all of the presents from us to andrew and all of the stocking stuffers and we donated a foot ball to the toys for tot's program.  I am sure this will be the very last year we will actually have fun shopping for christmas.  I am sure next year he will have things he wants and then we will be stuck with all of the other crazed parents looking for those things.  This year we just got to choose what we thought he might want.  He is getting a train set, a race track for cars that  you shake and then go, and several fun things in his stocking like a little water bottle with his name on it.  No candy in the stocking this year but I am sure grammy will be sending candy for our stockings that we will share.  

Before the night ended, I got the bright idea to try and set up a christmas card setting so we could get some cute pics.  The dogs were very cooperative, the toddler not so much so.  Need to work on his shaping skills and his stay:)  

Merry Christmas To All!  Hope if you had a santa experience this year that it was low on the trauma scale for you and yours.