after lots of planning ... big visions ... great intentions ... for a fantastic, amazing, creative, custom Christmas card this year, I found myself completely out of time to get a card put together! I FINALLY got our Christmas cards created, ordered, picked up, stuffed, addressed, stamped & delivered to the post office on December 23 ... but at least they made it out before Christmas Day!
Here is our family's Christmas Card for 2010 ...
This weekend we took Kendall to the Gaylord Texan hotel in Grapevine so she could get her picture taken with Santa ... we'd been trying to take her to see Santa several different times this month, but it just hadn't worked out until now. I LOOOOVE the Gaylord Texan ... I LOVE that they decorate (I mean seriously decorate!) for Christmas ... tons of Christmas trees all decorated in different themes, millions of twinkling lights and all the family-fun things to see & do. I have been dreaming of taking Kendall there since last Christmas ... and since she literally ooooh's & aaaahhhh's and wow's at just about everything these days, I knew she would love seeing all the decorations, right along with me! I had extremely high expectations of this outing of lots of family fun, but realistic low expectations of getting even a somewhat-decent, majorly-overpriced picture of her smiling while sitting on Old Saint Nick's lap ... I truly expected a screaming crying picture of our sweet (nearly) 20 month old ... especially after this year's 1st encounter of Santa, when she sat on his lap at our preschool!
Side Note: Here's how her 1st encounter went ... she was crying so hard, I could hear her from across the school (for quite a while), so I finally decided to go find her to see if I could help calm her down ... when I got to the room, there she was sitting on his lap & crying and being terrified of sweet old Santa ... and also crying & mad that she was wearing these "reindeer antlers" her teacher had put on her head for the picture. She would not settle down until I got her ... so together, we sat next to Santa for a picture. So, I felt my original expectations of seeing Santa here at the Gaylord were well founded after that 1st experience! ha!
Now back to our outing at the Gaylord ...
We finally got parked & got into the hotel ... we walked in & immediately saw Santa's line and decided to get this part of our outing done & over with first. We were glad that we did because we were the next to last ones accepted to see Santa before he was leaving for an hour break ... so we made it just in time. The line moved pretty quickly & Santa's team of helpers were very efficient & good with all the kids. Daddy had been holding her during the line, so when it was our turn, he took her up to see Santa, sat her on his lap & then we both jumped over by the camera operator ... Kendall had looked up at Santa, he talked with her & she was getting a little scared, but Santa asked her about her bear she was holding ... we sang her favorite song when trying to get her to look up for the camera ("roll the dough, roll the dough, POP it in the pan!") ... she smiled a little ... at least she wasn't screaming & crying like I'd been imagining she would ... the lady took several shots. I went to get her from Santa and we told him that she wanted a rocking horse that "nay's". There were a couple of good pictures ... but settled on this one ... (sorry about the quality here ... this is a scanned version of the picture.)
