Dear Santa

Preparing for Christmas this year has been quite the drawn-out process! Not only are we getting ready for Santa, but we're also getting ready for Baby Girl Cousin #2, who is set to arrive on December 16. With that, and Gavin's first birthday on December 20, we'll have quite the social calendar each year in December!

It took us three days to put ornaments on our trees. We let Miles go crazy on our "family" tree, so the lower third of the tree has about 5 ornaments on each branch. Here's Round One:



Luckily, Marshall hasn't quite figured out that the ornaments are there yet in all of his crawling adventures. He's pretty focused on cords right now, so maybe he'll be drawn to the tree once he tires of that.

We had an impromtu photo session to see what we could come up with for our Christmas cards, and we got quite a few keepers! I was planning on using the world's cutest school pictures, but the Christmas ones turned out so well that we abandoned that plan. I won't spoil the surprise, but here's one that we didn't use. I think Miles looks so old in this one - it hurts my heart!



Today we visited Santa at my work. Marshall was not his biggest fan:



Miles told Santa that he wanted the race track thing that goes on the wall. Shortly after Thanksving, I helped him write his letter to Santa. Here's the transcript. I think Santa will probably do a pretty good job getting most of the stuff on this list, so you might not want to buy him any of this stuff!

Dear Santa,
I would like more socks. Some of my socks are too small and too empty. I want a train (like a black train on a black track). That is what I saw on a kid newspaper. A black robot (editor's note: Miles has been referring to him recently as "a black guy"). He's that tall and says "MM. MM. MM." and he moves his feet like that. And he talks to other robots and says, "Hey, I'm a robot." He tackles him! Maybe a gumball machine that's like big and straight with colored gumballs inside...like a rainbow. On my next one, I want another robot that punches Transformer bad guys. A star machine with lots of twinkly stars. A grabber thingy that can grab my boots and throw it in my room and let go and pops in my room. I want some new boots. Some more crayons too. A Mr. Potato Head that goes on his head. I want maybe a boat just like on the Curious George movie and it goes, "Moooooot!" (like loud). Two rocket ship crayons.

I like you Santa.

Love,
Miles