I survived

I survived a trip to see Santa. We went after preschool yesterday so that I could get an idea of what the kids wanted before Jim and I did our shopping (we had a shopping date on Friday night).

Tips for seeing Santa....

• Check when his hours are....we got there and ate lunch (which was a whole ordeal in and of itself because the boys were not in agreement of where we should go) and by the time we were done Santa was on his lunch. We killed time by riding the little Christmas train.
• Have fresh diapers on. I don't know if we actually peed on Santa but when Doug got up his pull-up was saturated enough that some squished out the back and he had a wet spot about the size of an apple at the back.
• Beware that your children may be influenced by what they have seen that day. Andy was all about some machine where you put in money and candy comes out (a gumball machine perhaps?) because apparently a child had brought one for share day at preschool.

So I didn't really gain all that much insight about what to get the kids and Jim and I spent somewhere in excess of 2 hours walking around Toys'R Us thinking about what to get the kids. We're at that point where we didn't want to duplicate something we had, we wanted toys that inspire imaginative play, we aren't ready for big gifts like game systems and we're thinking of bikes for their birthday in the Spring, Josie has so many hand-me-down toys already, so it's hard to buy.
We ended up with Planet Heroes stuff for Doug & Andy and Josie is getting her own little Tinkerbell chair to sit in.