Holidays 2004

About

A smattering of pictures from Halloween and Christmas 2004.

Pictures

Preparing for Halloween. She went as a princess this year, which contained a half-dozen unprepared fatherly heart-attacks in one - just look at that picture: Fingernail polish My little girl applying "makeup" ($0.99 Kmart glitter, I'm not *that* crazy.) Curling iron Hairspray Etc. All she had to do was slam a door and yell "YOU DON'T UNDERSTAND!" and I would have aged fourteen years in one night.

The aforementioned curling iron. She took it like a pro.

More work. Who ever knew that being a Princess was so hard? I thought that they just rolled right out of bed, grabbed the tiara from the nightstand and away they went...

The finished product.

This is actually a few nights before 'real' Halloween. The local ECFE kids program hosted a costume party, so we dressed her up for it.

Painting some glue on. Notice that while all the kids dressed up, all the parents went as 'Parents'.

Linnea and her friend Rachel, who went as Doroth the Dinosaur, a character from the Wiggles.

More of the Tissue Paper art. Anyone who's done this sort of work before knows that the instant the paper gets wet, all the color starts coming off on your hands. This is why Sara is hovering so close, with all that leaky red tissue paper, we didn't want Linnea to wind up with people guessing 'Carrie?' by the end of the night.

What's a party without cookies?

This is just a setup to the next picture. The activity that she's at had a big basket of these little orange pompons and some buckets. There wasn't much activity to it, so Linnea decided that the point was to throw buckets of them in the air.

What did I tell you?

Moving on from Halloween, this is one of our attempts to take our own Christmas card pictures. The drawback here was that in order to make the fireplace look nice, we had to turn it way up. Linnea didn't want anything to do with it, what with wearing a turtle neck and tights. I didn't blame her.

To keep her away from the heat, we tried a few floor shots.

Winter Walk 2004. This is an annual Northfield event where the downtown is lit by candles, the shops are open, and about a zillion people come down to take part in the festivities. Linnea seems to like it.

Not only do many people come down, the Big Man comes too: Santa. We were camped out on Bridge Square waiting for his arrival.

Since he wasn't there, we sat in his chair and took pictures.

Still not there, might as well run off a little steam.

And then: Santa. As you can tell, the exuberance dropped to zero as she suddenly became aware of the story made flesh in front of her.

She is not cool with the whole Santa thing suddenly. We didn't push her - she was terrified as you can see. She would keep a radius of about thirty feet but wouldn't get any closer. There may have been a few tears too.

Things were better when we left to see all the other things. This was a Girl Scout choir. By now, she had perked back up again.