Meeting Santa Clause

Nana will be picking Emerson up from school this afternoon (in order for me to be able to avoid the chaos that is Elf Night on Thomasville Road), so she met us at school first thing this morning to switch cars, since she doesn’t have a car seat in her car. And Emmie was definitely excited to see her Nana!

And here’s the cute fake fireplace I mentioned yesterday, and made sure to get a picture of today.

She showed Nana where her beloved muffins were…

And then we still had a great, super easy drop-off! I was afraid she would be ultra upset with both Mommy & Nana leaving her at the same time, but she was content with her muffin, and distracted by her teachers’ bouncy snowman headband, so we were A-OK!

And then shortly after getting to work, I knocked my coffee cup over and made a mess.  Luckily, it seemed like the majority of the spill was on the paper, and I could just throw that away and print it again for my case review. And the silver lining was, since I had to get up from my desk to grab paper towels from the bathroom to clean up with, I noticed that a coworker had brought in a batch of Christmas treats! So I picked up some of those on my way past…

I didn’t know what they were when I first ate them, but they were delicious. Soft and sweet, with fruits and nuts… I asked her later, and she said it was Icebox Fruitcake, and man it was so good! (Through the day, I may or may not have eaten more than just what’s seen below…)

Since it was so cold today (and I don’t ever wear pants to work, except jeans on casual Friday), I wore a long dress and closed-toe shoes, plus scarf & sweater. That’s my usual version of winter-wear.

But today I added surprise Christmas tights underneath my dress, for extra fun and added warmth! And it was so cozy 🙂

So last year, Emmie met a few different Santa’s around town, and she didn’t like any of them. She was crying in two of the photos, and Jeff and I both tried holding her in the third, with her looking very leery. But she met him again at school today, and she did so great!!

We’ve been watching videos on YouTube about Santa, and she has her little Santa plate, and we’ve been talking about him quite a bit too. We’ve told her over & over that he’s not scary, and she doesn’t need to be scared of him. When we talked about it last night, to tell her he was coming today, I told her she would get to tell him what present she wanted for Christmas. (Side note – she told me she wanted a baby doll. She’s actually said this a few times, and even though she already has three or four baby dolls at home, it looks like we might need to get her another one since, she has consistently repeated that a few times over the last couple of weeks.) Anyways, I guess our talks all finally kicked in, because it looks like she had a great visit with Santa today, and was all smiles instead of screams!

For comparison, here’s all three 2018 Santa encounters, as an almost-1.5-year-old, and not happy about any of it…

But back in 2017, when she was just 5 months old, she was such a happy Tater Tot each time she met him!

So I’m just thrilled she had a successful Santa-meeting today. We’re not sure yet if we’re really going to “do the whole Santa thing” not (in fact, my sister and I didn’t grow up believing in Santa), but at this age, it’s fun, and it’s (mostly) cute & happy, so we’ll just see how it all goes…

Still not in much of a reading mood (or maybe I’m just in more of a Netflix mood?), so I ate my leftover lasagna from Monday night (still super yummy!), and watched Netflix on my phone during my lunch break.

Nana picked up Emmie once she got off work, and we all met up for dinner at Cracker Barrel. (The main point of this was to avoid getting stuck forrreverrr in the Elf Night traffic on Thomasville Road, but it worked out great to eat dinner with them too!

Of course there about one billion toys in the Cracker Barrel store that Emmie loved and wanted. But when she fell in love with this giant plush narwhal, and it was on sale for $9.99, even I couldn’t deny what a great deal that was! So I made her put it back on the shelf, and after dinner, we snuck around and bought it for as another Christmas gift. I think she’s going to be so excited when she sees it under the tree on Christmas morning!

Emerson chose biscuits and scrambled eggs for dinner, and ate her whole biscuit, and all of her two eggs. And then pretty much as soon as she was done eating, she wanted to get down and check out all the things. She loved the pretty tree, and she especially loved the fireplace! She was like, “wow, it’s hot!”

She also kept asking what the wood was. She would point at it and say, “what’s this? what’s this?” And I said “WOOD” about 10 times, but I’m still not sure she was convinced 😉

I showed her how to warm her little hands, and then she loved doing that.

PopPop taught her tonight to do a fist bump with an explosion tonight, and she thought it was really great.

After dinner, we did two of our advent calendars, she specifically requested her Rudolph jammies (which were clean because we happened to wash a load of her laundry last night), she helped me feed Pretzel, and then we went on the search for Sheppy.

Oh, and when we were looking for socks, she saw her mittens in the drawer, and just needed to wear them around the house for a while.

She walked right by Sheppy two or three times, and completely missed him. I made her keep circling the table, and even stared right in his direction, before she finally found him, keeping watch over the record collection. (On a side note – I really want a different thing to keep the records in, ideally, one of those old, vintage apple crates or something like that.)

She wanted to watch a few night-night videos in Mommy’s bed, so we got all cuddled up together. As she was pulling the covers up, she was like, “I cover my arms, I cover my elbows…” I thought it was funny 🙂

Prayer-time, still wearing the mittens. (By the way, Aunt Jane brought these back from Ireland, and they’re the softest real sheep’s wool.)

We only got about halfway through “White Christmas” last night (it’s two hours long and we didn’t start until after 9pm, and I’m an old lady and can’t stay up super late), so we’re going to have hot raspberry tea and finish the movie.