Guess who we saw today?!

In addition to all the usual holiday ho-hah (mailing presents, wrapping presents, finding presents, remembering where I hid the presents), we are doing swimming lessons every day from 8:10 to 9:20. I am also playing in and reffing the Juneau Holiday Cup (our team name is Ring-A-Ding-Ding, RADD for short, in case you want to follow our standings...)

Today after lessons, the girls and I stopped by our local Safeway picking up some grub for Greg's office party when a very friendly (and rather meddling in retrospect) stranger walked up and said, "Hey, did ya know Santa's across the street right now? He's over at the hardward store!"

Guess what we did? Well, yeah, you betcha... as soon as we completed our purchase, we hightailed it straight over to see the jolly guy in red! Earlier this week, we had seen him at the mall, but neither girl could think of what she wanted, so Santa told them to just write a letter and put it in his mailbox there at the mall. Both girls came home that day and got right to work. So today, we had our letters handy and wanted to just give them to him when we heard he was nearby.

And did I mention that we have come directly from swimming with snarly, wet hair and red, chlorine eyes?


Now, we rarely listen to the radio in the car (too much garbage and inappropriate stuff), but if we had been today, we would have known BEFORE we got to the hardware store that the radio station was doing a live remote broadcast, with Santa as the star and that they were sending out urgent pleas on the radio for kids to come see him. Ugh! We have the two most shy girls ever. They don't make eye contact, they nod instead of speaking aloud, and they are therefore really not well-suited to the radio airwaves.

When we had seen Santa at the mall, Gwen wouldn't even get near him. In fact, while Amelia was perched up on Santa's lap (but not speaking to him of course) the elves belittled Gwen so much she started crying on the way home about how mean they were. Call me crazy, but with our track record of Santa encounters, we are the least likely to be fabulous radio air filler.

But in we waltzed, unknowing and totally unprepared. There was a collective crescendo of "Oh! AAAH! Children!" as several producers, clerks, and other assorted vultures swarmed us excitedly and loudly asking, "Oh, did you come to see Santa?! You did, right?! You really wanted to see him, didn't you? Oh yes! You can barely wait, huh?! Aren't you SO excited?!!!"

Do these kids look SO excited or what?!


She looks more, um... terrified?



Excited? Not so much.



Even Santa doesn't look all that jolly.

 Gwen decided on the way in the door that she was going to deliver her letter to the mailbox in the mall instead of giving it to Santa at the hardware store. But we gave Santa Amelia's letter; he opened it and she had asked for a picture of him. Just Santa, no kids. Here it is! The folks at the store were nice enough to email these all to us, including this one that might just end up under the tree.

The moral of the story? Next time we'll bring the hairbrush to swimming.