I Caught Santa

My husband said yesterday, "We sure do go to great lengths to lie to our kids, right?"  And I laughed.  How awful is that?  I don't want to be a mother that lies to her children!  This Santa business, however, is big-time lying and  I guess we will keep doing it until they finally push themselves away from the table and yell, "NO MORE SANTA FOR ME, MOM!" (Peggy Sue Got Married reference.  Anybody?)

Pay attention to this mug.  You will see it later.

Both of my sons still believe.  They are 7- and 3-years-old now.  My 7-year-old came home from school a couple of times this month and said that some of his friends said Santa wasn't real.  He is in the first-grade, so many of his friends are still 6.  His birthday is in October.  When asked what he said in return, he replied that most of his friends told that kid that Santa IS real.  He was quite disgusted with the fact that someone would have the nerve to say Santa wasn't real.  It is possible that he may have some doubt, however.

My three-year-old?  He's all about it, which you would expect, of course.  He wants to sit on every Santa's lap he passes.  Here's the deal: he wants a bike.  He HAS a bike, though.  His bike isn't even that old.  One of the training wheels came off, though, and he needs a new training wheel.  My 7-year-old needs a new bike, so when he asked Santa for one, my 3-year-old decided he needed a new one.  I keep telling the 3-year-old that I was going to tell Santa he didn't need a new bike, because his bike was fine.  The look he gives me is priceless.  He asked Santa for that bike and how dare I interfere with the deal those two are making!  When we are at the mall recently, he begged to go sit in Santa's lap AGAIN.  I told him that we had already sat on Santa's lap three times.  There wasn't a line, though, so I finally agreed.  He marched up to Santa very confidently, sat on his lap, told him he wanted a blue bike very matter-of-factly, hopped off and looked at me as if to say, "That business is taken care of, Mom."

We'll see what Santa decides to do.

Because the two believe in Santa like they do, I have gone to two websites to kind of play along.  The first one is Portable North Pole.  This is the website where you enter some information in about your child and then Santa uses it in a personalized video.  They were GLUED to the computer screen witnessing their fate with the "Naughty or Nice Machine".  While my three-year-old was watching it, I made his drink in a Santa mug.  He told me, "I want to show Santa!"  I didn't know what he meant, but within seconds I see him march over to where the Santa video was playing and hold his cup to the screen.  Sweet dude thought Santa would be able to see it.  Don't worry.  I didn't let him hold his cup up there for long.

There's the mug!

The other website is ICaughtSanta.com.  This is a website that is very easy to use and allows you to print pictures of Santa in your home!  Crazy, right?  After taking a picture of my tree and our fireplace, I uploaded the pictures, used their software to superimpose Santa on the photos, downloaded it and then uploaded it to Walgreens where I will pick up the photos for a total of 38 cents later today.  My plan is to leave the pictures near the milk and cookies Santa has eaten with a little note for them from him.  The pictures are normally $10 each to create on ICaughtSanta.com, but they are offering you all the photos for 50% off by using the code SANTA50 when you check-out.  You can find this fun website here and follow them on Facebook here.

An example of an icaughtsanta.com picture.

(That's not my house, homies.)

So, yeah, lots of lying...or, can we just say pretending?  Lots of pretending.  I like that better.  I hope you and your family have a very Merry Christmas!

*Although this post was sponsored by icaughtsanta.com, the opinions are my own.*