And So It Begins….

So this is the photo I promised.
Took the girls Tuesday evening, and did the portrait thing with them. Every year we do a photo of all four grand kids for my folks. We also do just the two of them, seeing as how I don’t think my outlaws are that interested to have pix of my brother’s kids in their house. Call me crazy! Since my two are the youngest I figured it might make sense to try and get pix of just the two of them at a different time, shorter attention spans and all. So went over to the mall, did those photos, let them run around in the kids area

Side note: Why do people think it’s ok to let their children run wild in the kids play area in a mall? Most of the kids there are usually under the age of 2 and sweet. There’s always at least one or two 4-6 YOs literally racing around, jumping over other kids and parents, knocking kids, people and strollers over and generally being obnoxious. Inevitably they hurt someone’s preshuuusbabeeee and those with the smaller kids leave. Not my preshusbabee mind you, cause I’d go kick their arces if they get too close. Ok, I wouldn’t physically hurt them, but I would give them the mommy speak smack down and look of death. And if that doesn’t work I’ll go humiliate their parents. And if that doesn’t work I’ll threaten to have Stephen Cobert put them On Notice. Bet you’re totally jonesing to hang with me at the mall now, aren’t ya?

So anyway, I bribed them w/a promise of McD’s if they would participate during photos. I don’t know if that worked of if I just got lucky, but the pix came out pretty good. Since they were dressed up already I decided to hit the Clause Booth. Let me tell you, good call on my part. We walked right up to Santa & took our time. No one was there! I highly recommend the Tuesday evening Santa visit BTW. DD1 was able to tell him what she wanted (“an American Girl doll that’s Big like her cousin S” and the mermaid costume and the gold dress with the crown….”). Santa then pointed out a skylight above us where you could see “the tops of the reindeer antlers on the roof where he’d parked his sled”. (Good call, cause she asked where his sled was when we got there & I told her that the mall gives him special parking on the roof.) She was pretty excited.

DD2 had a different sort of experience. She would NOT sit on his lap. (Did you guess that, what gave it away?) He gave her a small candy cane and she thought was good, but she still wasn’t leaving mommy. Maybe she has more common sense then the rest of us. So mommy is in the pix. While I'm glad this photo came out so well, I wish I could photoshop myself out, but the way Santa's beard is next to my shoulder makes me think it would look weird if I did. I'd kind of like to photoshop the experience from my mind too. Just before they'd take each photo, Santa would "bounce" his knee on my side. Ummm, inappropriate, much? It kind of perved me out, but I think (I want to believe) that the "photo elf" was giving him a signal to do it in order to get DD2 to smile for the actual photo. That's the story I'm going with ok, cause otherwise, ewww! I have all kinds of issues with the fact that I'm encouraging my daughters to sit on a strange man's lap & take candy from him, so like I said I'm trying not to think about it too much. I'm trying not to ruin it for myself.

I hadn’t really thought that part out, (that I might need to be in the photo too) so I had on sweats, but luckily they were black & my top happened to be red. Too bad my hair was so out of whack and that I didn’t have make up on, sigh, the sacrifices we make for our parents. You do know this is all about the photo for the grandparent’s right?

Speaking of….


Guess who’s got the girls today? They’re hereeeee! We’re headed to the City (San Francisco) this weekend as it’s my BIL’s 40th and he’s have a big par-tay. We even got a hotel room so we can cab it and drink all the Zin we want!!! All the cousins are flying in for it and DS's folks came out to watch the girls so we could spend the weekend up there. More on all this later.