Meeting Santa

Wow .. December has been such a busy month. We got all our lights up before Thanksgiving to make way for our annual holiday party (another fact that tends to lead one to believe that perhaps I was adopted as well. As far as I know, the Platts have never put up a tree before Dec. 22 of any year and according to Platt legend, the tree is bad luck if kept up past Jan. 1st. This brings us to thinking why should we bother if the tree will only be up for less than 10 days. Ah, JP, is that the point??)

Sasha's latest favorite trick is to see how many times he can climb on and off a chair. I so prefer this game to his other fav which is to see how many times Mama can put the monkeys on his back (physically a monkey on his back ... see the photo), he can pull them off and bring them back to Mama to repeat again until Mama almost loses her mind. Ah, to be two again. Everything is SO much fun repeating 200 times.

On Sunday, we traveled to a center where one of our therapists works out of. They had a Christmas party complete with face painting and a chance to take a photo with Santa. We knew this would probably be our best shot at getting a photo of Sasha with the bearded legend. I'm sure you can guess what Sasha thought of Santa. Let's see ... a big, old guy with a huge beard, big red suit and a funky hat with glasses. A stranger ... no promises of toys was enough to get him past the fact that he was not someone that Sasha knew. However, a bag of goodies eventually let Sasha focus on something he could really get into - CHOCOLATE! Perhaps this old guy wasn't so bad after all.

Brenda, Sasha's Occupational Therapist, worked on a picture for Sasha's face. He chose Rudolf which provided Brenda some added difficulty (Face paints + complex picture + constantly moving Sasha = Very difficult).

Eventually the little sack ran out of chocolate and we gave Sasha his first dum-dum. This is the photo of him thinking "Hey .. this isn't chocolate! Perhaps if I bite through it I'll find the chocolate."