Day 14: Santa!!

As you may have guessed from yesterday's post, Saturday was all about Santa fun!  We went to Saturdays with Santa at Devon again and managed to see the big guy this time.  Their system of text messages and line management is amazing.  I mostly hoped that the two older kids would get through it OK, but Santa was very kind and encouraged us to try adding E.  Grandma loves the picture of all three because there are so many hands holding on to E.  (We may have encouraged the bigs to help E with this experience:)  It was so cool. The kids managed to talk to him about what they want and we took MANY pictures.  (Ps. all of this was free and so calm, with no one pushing us along). 

As this was one of E's first Santa experiences (and he wasn't looking at the camera in the group ones).  I added a tab with that arrow of the pictures of just E and Santa (the big guy suggested it-- also very cool).  Above the photo (on the back of the group photo) is a checklist from the SC kit and added the kids names with checks next to the "nice" list. 

I really wanted more photos of the experience in this book and as it is my Dec. Daily there are no rules so I added a photo insert with seven more small pictures of the day.  

The top two are the kids waiting in the rotunda for their turn and looking down (waiting here was only 2 min).  The bottom two are E discovering the Devon tower atrium.  He wasn't with us last time and loved all the decorations and pine cones hanging from above. 

The back side is what we did in the three hours before it was our turn to see Santa (seriously, we got there at 10:03 and I think saw Santa just before 1pm.  However, we weren't inline during the wait and had lots of fun.  The kids colored together, and made packages for the troops with the Korenaks.  We also drove over to Waffle Champion and had a fabulous lunch.  B loves it there!

And THEN, we went home for a few hours and the kids watched their videos from Santa (via Polar North Pole).  This is a tradition we started with inspiration from Ali Edwards and they love it.  They both seemed really nervous waiting for the reveal of whether they were on the nice or naughty list.  

And here are the two pages together.  We actually also went to a birthday party for our friends' one year old twins.  We handed out books as Christmas presents to the kids that were there.  It is beginning to feel more like Christmas every day!