2 Weeks Till Christmas

Yowza!  Where did the time go?!  Last weekend we visited Santa and that involved getting dressed up in actual clothes (something of an obscurity in these parts).

Frugal Boy wasn’t entirely thrilled with the idea, but I thought he looked mighty handsome.

While we waited in line for Santa I tried to get him excited.  I explained what the other boys and girls were doing.  “He’s sitting in Santa’s lap”, “She’s telling Santa what a good girl she’s been.”  Ever since the yard decorations have started going up around town Frugal Boy has been on a Santa babble.  I thought there might be hope for a great photo this year.

Hmmm… He’s not too sure about this.  Maybe if we had let him wear his snow boots like he wanted he would have felt better about the whole situation.

Shae got a couple of photos before it turned into a “SAVE ME DADA”.

Oh well.  The whole process is rather creepy.  Hey, go sit on that strangers lap while everyone looks at you and takes pictures.  There was another pair of parents with a similar aged girl and she noped right out of there.

We took a few more photos with the props, but we could tell his heart wasn’t in it, so we called it a morning.

A week later, this afternoon, his Christmas present arrived in the mail.  He has been glued to the Duplo block table that we built him a month ago.

Duplo is the Lego brand building block for ages 1.5-5.  They are compatible with the smaller Lego pieces and unsurprising are expensive.  I used to think that Lego was expensive, but Duplo is even worse!  At retail, it costs about $1 per block!  ¡Aye caramba!

With a little shopping though, it is possible to find good deals on building sets.  I purchased a 123 piece lot from eBay for $20 with shipping.  That comes to about 16¢/block.

If you have the patience you could also find good deals at yard sales or on your local Craigslist.  Finally, if you are concerned about the cleanliness of used bricks, you can put them in a mesh bag in the top rack of the dishwasher.  Just make sure not to use high heat otherwise you might melt them!