Help! The World is Being Taken Over By Jolly Fat Men!

Oh the Santa's! Everywhere we go, Santa is there waiting to give us presents and candy and shake our hand or give us hug. The first two times it was cute. Now Mateo is probably thinking the world is being over-run by white fat men in silly red suits who laugh too much. But seriously, I would expect a Santa at the mall, and even our social services family holiday party, but church? Yes, really, Santa came to church today, in a fire truck. It was great, the kids loved it, but I was a bit surprised. It's church. Aren't churches not supposed to believe in that kind of stuff? Shouldn't Jesus come riding in on a fire truck? Well, I guess the finale of that version wouldn't be as good as Santa and his "Ho, ho, ho's" and candy canes.

Santa #1 - quiet mall Santa who is kind but especially photogenic

Santa #2 - DCF party Santa who brings a present for all of the
foster/adopted children in our office area.


Santa #3 - Church Santa who's too fat for the kids to sit on his lap. Notice the uncomfortable face Mateo is making as he's pushed off the lap by Santa's jolly ole' belly.

On another note, I have completely given up on having a modest Christmas for Mateo. Since my husband has very little self-control when it comes to buying toys. I'm wondering if his love language is giving gifts. Or maybe he's still trying to make up for leaving us fatherless while he went to China for 3 weeks. If that's the case, just a diamond or two would do for me. So I've tried to keep the presents to a minimum. He is 2 after all. He'd probably be happy with a balloon on a string and never know he missed out on anything. But Dave is obsessed with making the perfect train table for Mateo. When I agreed to the train table for Christmas idea, Dave was planning to duplicate a smallish one we saw at Ikea. Well, he ran out of time to build one from scratch (big surprise), so he bought a Melissa & Doug brand one from his company at a discount, and the thing is gigantic. Seriously, it's huge! And we have a very small house. And I don't mean a modest size house that's small to mansion standards, I mean it's tiny. Really tiny. Anyway, we planned on putting the train table in the living room corner, but upon assembling this new one, we realized it would never fit in one small corner. Mostly, because it takes up the entire living room. Like, all of the floor space we have in our living room. So, now we have to take everything out of the playroom, which will become the train table room, since that's about all that will fit in there. Ugh! You can see that I'm thrilled about this idea. Well, I guess the payoff will be that Mateo absolutely loves the thing and plays with it for hours on end leaving me to surf the internet and stalk more blogs. Think there's any chance that will happen?