Our visit to see the jolly old fella...

This afternoon we took Grace to see Santa. If you remember my Visions of Sugarplums post a while back I had an idea to set up a "Baking Cookies with Santa" photo shoot for this year's Santa trip. And let me tell you, I'm so glad I did! After all, mama knows best and mini marshmallows make for some sweet, oooey-gooey smiles! Grace did awesome and when we left I was so happy I had the guts to ask the photographer a couple of months back to let me stage the baking scene rather than the classic sitting-in-santa's-lap, which Grace is just too young for right now.

I had a lot of fun gathering all the goodies for the shoot. I was excited I got to use some of my red vintage mini bundt cake pans. And of course, I had Grace's favorites - decorating sprinkles, some new favorites - candy canes and mini marshmallows, as well as Little Debbie gingerbread men cookies (hint, these hold up well for photos because they're not soft and therefore take longer to get all sticky) and a giant old-fashioned lollie. I also found a wooden christmas cookie play set at Target that had the cutest little gingerbread man child-sized oven mitt and rolling pin. Grace was so excited to "bake" like she does with mama that she didn't mind it too much when the jolly old man came in! No tears this year!!!

Now I will say that he didn't become her best friend or anything like that, in fact at one point she said, "Santa, go...go Santa". And she didn't like it too much when he tried to talk to her, but so long as she was baking (and eating marshmallows), she didn't mind Santa helping :) The photographer had an "assistant" - a stuffed monkey - that Grace quickly labeled "George" and I think we caught some sweet smiles. I'm excited, can't wait to see the photos!

And tomorrow I'll share with you something that is really important to me and that I'm so proud my little pumpkin knows...stay tuned!

Ho, Ho, Ho...Merry Christmas!