Visiting Santa

We went to the children's holiday party for my work today. Although Liam is still pretty little, we couldn't pass up his first photo with Santa.

Last year Karsten was NOT a fan of Santa. I think everyone has a picture with their child screaming on Santa's lap - ok, maybe not everyone but definitely the photo obsessed parents like me who pursue the picture even when it's obviously a lost cause. :)

I should have known this year was not going to go well when we were in line and Karsten said 'me no want talk Santa' and the look on his face in this picture is identical to the one from last year when he was watching Santa.

We decided to let Liam have his picture taken with Santa first to show Karsten that Santa was not scary. Santa said he wanted to do a special pose with Liam since he was so tiny.


Then we tried to get Karsten to sit on Santa's knee but Karsten was having none of it. We tried to get him to stand right in front of Santa - nope. We tried to bribe him with the candy cane to stand in front of Santa - nope. Finally, Scott had the brilliant idea to have him stand NEXT to Liam, not Santa. That sort of worked, at least we got Karsten in the picture with Santa. I think it kind of looks like Karsten just wandered into the photo. LOL


After the photo with Santa, Liam was still asleep, so there was time for Karsten to play some of the fun games at Zonkers. He really enjoyed the cars that he could 'drive'.


And he thought the purple horse was pretty cool - look at that smile!


Then we headed over to ride another horse on the carousel. He also rode a cute little train; unfortunately, I was chatting with someone and missed the photo opp. Oopsie.


Liam slept through all of this fun. Don't you love their shirts - my mom made them. Karsten has three frosty's (as he calls them) on his shirt and Liam has one frosty. Stay tuned for another post to debut the rest of their Christmas shirts.


Who doesn't love skee ball? Unfortunately, each ball that Karsten threw came right back to him, so Scott and I got to throw the balls for him.




Trying to throw the balls into a trash can in another game.


He was a fan of the basketball game - he kept wanting to step forward and walk right up to the basket. He may have gotten more tickets if he had done it that way. :)


Karsten finished off his morning by climbing into the big play area with tubes and slides and tunnels. These always make us nervous because he doesn't quite have the hang of climbing up some kinds of obstacles. Unfortunately, he couldn't figure out how to get up one of the levels and sat there and cried while Scott tried to calm him down and tell him how to either go up or come down. He finally worked his way out and was not a happy camper, he was upset he got stuck AND that he didn't get to go down the slide. :) We were able to cheer him up by redeeming his tickets for a slinky (or in Karsten's words, a yo yo). :)