Thanksgiving was also a real treat - we all had a lot of things to be thankful for this year. And Jack enjoyed hanging out with his new baby cousin Skylar.
On Friday, Billy and Uncle Travis braved the early morning to go save us a place in line to see Santa (the old Miller & Rhodes Santa) at the Children's Museum. Since we can't travel back up to Richmond before Christmas, this was our one shot. I was imagining the funny looks that two guys with no children would be getting standing in a line for Santa (can you say child molester?) but as it turns out, everyone else had the same idea. The difference was Billy and Travis were saving a place for one child. Several people in front of us were apparently saving places for their entire clan. Seriously there were at least two groups in front of us with 15 or more people. So I have a new rule. If you're saving places in a line, you need to have a proportional number of line savers. Otherwise, you're just lulling everyone else into a false sense of complacency.
I'll get to the Santa debacle in a minute but let me first add a couple of hilarious things that we saw while in line.
1. The first was a family with 4 kids who were clearly taking a Christmas card picture with Santa. The problem? All four were teenagers. It probably won't seem nearly as funny reading it as it did witnessing it but I don't think I have laughed that hard in years. The 18 year old looked particularly chagrined.
2. A huge family (seriously like 20 people) that looked very ... wholesome were taking a similar Christmas card type picture when all of a sudden someone in the picture asked very loudly, "Is anyone missing a kid?" The woman in front of us looked and down and muttered something under her breath and then admitted that the extra belonged to her. This kid had apparently decided that he wanted to be part of someone else's family and so had joined the clan. It would have been so much funnier if no one had noticed and they had sent out their Christmas card pictures with some random kid in the background.
3. My personal favorites were the 12 or 13 year old girls, one of whom had her hair in a SIDE PONYTAIL and the other of which was wearing a pink dress with sequins. They both looked like they belonged to one of those dance teams for pre-teens that perform in competitions. Anyway, the mother or guardian or coach was feverishly applying various forms of makeup to these little girls, who, bless their hearts, were not going to look any better with some frosted Bonne Bell on their lips.
The people watching was really the best part of the day because when we got up to the dais, Billy made the rookie mistake of pointing out the train ornament on the tree next to Santa. Jack immediately freaked out until the very nice snow queen told us he could borrow it. Whatever it takes, she said in a tone much wiser than her sixteen years. So with Jack clutching his train and now smiling instead of crying we headed for Santa who unceremoniously grabbed the damn train out of his hand and put it back on the tree. You can see the quivering lip now can't you? Then he picked up Jack and put him on his lap and basically told Billy and me to move out of the way. Quivering lip became full blown tears. Can't blame him frankly. Now for someone who has been a classic Santa for so long, you'd think he would (a) know better and (b) not be such a jackass. So we now have the requisite picture of our kid crying in Santa's lap. Although I maintain I could have gotten the whole process to work smoothly if I hadn't been preempted by the grabbing Santa Claus.
We returned home Friday night and got all dressed up for the deb ball. It was such fun seeing all my cousins (who are much younger and more fun than we are) but we were exhausted and barely made it past midnight.
That you even made it TO midnight is incredibly impressive. I refuse to believe you are as pregnant as you claim. No pregnant lady stays out till midnite.
ReplyDeleteyou forget, i'm accustomed to not drinking...
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