Santa Claus is coming to town!

This year was a completely different experience as far as Santa goes for my kids. They actually enjoyed meeting him!!  I love how excited they were to tell him what they wanted and sit on his lap.  We had two opportunities to meet Santa: once at school and once at our neighborhood get-together.  Both times they were great.  Here are our 2012 Santa pictures!

Evan and Santa at school

Evan and his class with Santa at school

Caitlin and Santa at school

Caitlin telling Santa what she wants (Rapunzel)

Caitilin and her class with Santa

Kids with Santa in our neighborhood

And yes, they are wearing shorts and short sleeves because it was like 80 that day...

Also, at our neighborhood event, they had cookies and a train!

Ellie, Evan, and Alex waiting on the train (you can see it all the way up the street with its puff of smoke)

All aboard! The dads were going to ride with the kiddos...

But then we decided to let the boys go by themselves.

Wave bye to everyone!

Avery and Caitlin - cute picture while waiting for Santa

And that's our Santa experience 2012.  The kids have been so excited about Christmas this year.  Every morning we look for our elf, Candy Cane (which by the way has been a GREAT tool for good listening since Candy Cane is watching to report back to Santa!). And then we get to put up part of our advent calendar, and then pull off one of our paper chain links counting down the days until Christmas. And finally, we watch an advent video on the computer that Oma sent us.  Whew! It's amazing we ever make it out of the house on time. Still, this time of year is so much fun. I love sharing it with my own children and making our own traditions.