Santa!

Santa!
Originally uploaded by tracyg00

I took the kids to the Winter Wonderfest Preview Party at Navy Pier on Thursday. For some reason, my company still gets invited to this cool event even though we no longer have an affiliation with Navy Pier. So lucky! Anyway, the kids had a great time. They rode the train, the ferris wheel, the carousel and other inflatable things. They ate loads of Connie's pizza, decorated their own sugar cookies --



-- ate those meticulously decorated cookies --



and visited Santa. I was wondering how Jake would react to Santa, since he surely doesn't remember him from last year. We were 4th in line when Santa came up and Jake started screaming, "Santa coming!" They got up there to see him and Mrs. Claus asked the kids what they had on their wish list. Megan told her she wanted dolly clothes and Jake screamed, "RACE CARS!". He definitely wasn't shy to Santa.

Here are some of the carousel shots:



Megan was pretending it was a real horse.

We didn't get home until a little after 9:00 and they didn't get to bed until about 9:30. Unfortunately for me, Jake decided to wake at 5:30 the next morning.

On Friday evening, Jimmy drove the kids and I to pick up the Volkswagen - which my dad had fixed for us. (Darin is in Phoenix, which is why we all had to go). Anyway, Megan fell asleep on the way and was quite crabby when she woke up. I unbuckled both car seats so that I could switch them to my own car, took Jake out of his seat and transferred his first. He was in the front seat of Jimmy's truck while I did the change and Jimmy was outside as well. Jake pressed the button and locked the doors. Did I mention that the truck was running? And did I also mention that it was 17 degrees outside and we weren't wearing gloves? We kept asking Jake to press the button and he was pressing in all the wrong places and finally said, "I can't do it". Meanwhile, Megan was too crabby to help and just sat in her seat with a scowl on her face.

Al was able to get a rod into the window to reach the button, but when he got close, Jake kept grabbing it. He was going to try to lower the window, but I had put the lock on. Jake had also cranked the heat all the way up and increased the volume of the radio to a level of serious rockin-out. Jake finally pressed the unlock button by accident and we were able to get in. Ugh.

Forunately, it's warmer today with a nicle layer of snow on the ground. We're gonna go outside to play and burn off some of this crazy energy.