1) Never take your kids to a Christmas Show in the late afternoon. We arrived at the Southern Christmas Show around 4 p.m. and starting at about 5 p.m., CootieBoy got REALLY fussy and eventually started throwing himself to the floor in tears when he didn’t get his way. Fortunately, he was still in a good mood when we saw Santa at 4:30 p.m. and had his picture taken (to come). Then CootieGirl because getting whiny and fussy, so we left at 6 p.m. having only seen about 20% of the exhibitors. Oh well. Next year – we’ll leave the kids with a babysitter and go.
2) Keep your kids’ fingernails trimmed. Today after church CootieGirl ran into my arms and one of her fingernails caught a very small mole on my arm and sheared it off. It’s now an hour later and it is STILL bleeding and painful. She was very cute and immediately apologized (three times) for hurting me. I told her it was an accident and that I wasn’t mad and she was very relieved about that.
As for the Christmas show, we did see a couple interesting exhibitors and could have easily spent much more time there, but the kids just made that impossible. The place was HUGE and teeming with people (we went late in the day because I was told that the buses leave in the late afternoon so it makes it less crowded). Well, if by “less crowded” they meant only 10,000 people as opposed to 15,000, then I don’t think weekends are the most stress-free way to go and shop. It was a mix of really nice exhibitors with beautiful crafts, and then those selling crap. We ended up buying one toy for each of the kids for Christmas (we did it without them seeing), and five cans of soup. Yep. Soup. Then we spent $30 on four hot dogs and two drinks only to find a whole food vendor section a few minutes later where we could have gotten four hot dogs and two drinks for $20. Oh well.