Christmas Fun

This year I decided to do the "25 Days of Loving your Spouse" countdown that I found on Pinterest thanks to the Dating Divas. It's just a little countdown for Ryan that goes through each day until Christmas. There's an envelope for everyday for him to open that either gives a compliment, tells something that I love about him or has a fun Christmas activity to do. (And since he's been removing cards everyday it's become a cute little way to display the Christmas cards we've been sent.) Yesterday his card said to meet us at Cheesecake Factory (yum!) for lunch and then we were going to visit Santa at the mall. We mainly wanted to visit Santa to see how Hailey would react to him. You see a lot of funny pictures of kids sitting on his lap!

We had a good time at lunch and Hailey did really well...until she stuffed too many Cheerios in her mouth and got too excited and then spit them up, all over her cute outfit. But me being the mom I am and wanting her to stay in her cute outfit, I just wiped it off and we went on about our lunch. Ha!

After lunch we went out into the mall and found Santa.

Isn't she just precious?!

Waiting...

Hailey really didn't seem to mind him too much...at first. Ryan was trying to take our picture from afar because we didn't want to pay the $15 dollars for one. (Are you kidding me?!) But I asked the lady and they let him take a close one too. That's when Hailey didn't like him too much.

first shot from afar

"I'm done! Let me outta here!"

Now,that the cuteness has past let me say that we've decided not to do the whole if-you're-good-Santa-will-bring-you-presents thing with Hailey. We've decided that we're going to tell her the true story of St. Nicholas and about how he was a good man that helped others by giving them gifts. Not that there's anything wrong if someone decides to do Santa with their children. It's just something we've been thinking about and just decided together that we want more of her focus to be on Jesus than Santa at Christmas time. But that doesn't mean that we can't take a few cute pictures or make memories. There...

One more shot of cuteness in another Christmas outfit

Ok, maybe two.