Waiting For Santa (or, What Were We Thinking)

First off. . .yes my pics are sideways. I have tried everything, I promise you, to rotate them. Bear with me as I learn this blog thing!

Today, after avoiding the mall like the plague and DEFINITELY not subjecting ourselves to the torture of waiting in line to see Santa (flashback to last year. . .waited in line forEVER to see Santa, only to have Gavin dissolve into a flood of tears the moment it was our turn, and then I turned into one of THOSE MOMS, who say desperate snips like "Well, I guess Santa won't come to OUR house this year if you won't sit on his lap!" Painful.). . .anyways, after avoiding lines and crying and parking a mile away and sounding like a bad mom in front of hundreds, David and I cheerfully decided to take the kids to the mall today (yes, the Saturday before Christmas) to yes, go see Santa. I am blaming our lapse in judgement on diaper pail fumes.

After trying to avoid 'car stalking' the shoppers leaving the mall (I have a new idea - maybe car stalkers should just give the tired shoppers a ride to their car and THEN take their parking spot instead of following 5 feet behind, creeping 3 miles an hour watching these poor souls lug sobbing children and bags and the emotional luggage of the Holidays as they try to remember where their car is parked), hiking 10 miles back to the mall after we parked (OK, maybe this is where I have exaggerated a bit. . .), and swimming upstream through a mass of shoppers, we located SANTA! First step, done. Next step? Obtaining a SANTA PAGER. No waiting in line for 2 hours at our mall - instead, we get to walk around the mall for 2 hours waiting to be paged! Yippee! The boys were surprisingly great, although about 1 hour into our wait, Gavin announced that he wasn't going to actually sit on Santa's lap, but instead he had kind of a 'drive by and throw my list at him' plan to execute. Hoping for the best, we pressed onward. We ate. We window shopped. We made returns. We got balloon art from the area's shortest balloon artist (his self-proclaimed title, not ours). We skipped nap time. You know what makes those little pagers go off? Walk to the farthest point that pager will reach with a 6 month old, a 4 year old, and a stroller full of everything BUT a 6 month old and 4 year old, and get in an incredibly long and slow Starbucks line. And order. Like magic, the pager went off, Merritt started fussing, Gavin suddenly had to pee, and David was stuck waiting for lattes. Fast forward to us getting to Santa (because I know you can imagine the drama of getting back to him). Step 3? Get in line! Because now we have a very special VIP line of people who have put their 2 hours of torture in, and boy did I feel like I was standing on the red carpet when the pager attendant lifted that barrier and let me in. I found myself standing there looking smugly at the poor suckers who were just arriving with beautifully dressed children, happy and excited to visit Santa, and as I watched the horror cross their parent's faces as the attendant handed them their pager and announced the 2 hour wait, my eyes drifted down to my 2 darlings.There was Gavin, hair completely static and sweater sleeves stretched out to the max and Merritt, glazed with strained carrots, probably neither really caring as much as I did that we were about to see Santa. David caught up to us, lattes in hand, and we moved closer and closer. We were next!!!! Smiling at each other and knowing that very soon we would be getting into our car and GOING HOME, we looked down to see Gavin holding his head and crying. How could he be hurt?? We were just standing in line. No,  not my Gavin. He never just stands in line. When we weren't looking, he was messing around on the brick divider and bashed his forehead, producing the largest pone (how is THAT for a southern term?) right in the middle of his forehead. We wiped tears, walked up to Santa, and amazingly, Gavin climbed right onto his lap and smiled. I am thanking the concussion for that one.