Merry Freaking Christmas

Today was one of those days that we had the perfect day planned, and nothing went as planned.  First, we got the boys up and dressed in matching outfits to go to my school to have Breakfast with Santa. We hyped it up and even ran to Staples ahead of time to get a gift card to donate to one of the local schools damaged by the Hurricane.  We unpacked the boys, started trucking into the school and realized that we had the wrong day.  Breakfast with Santa is tomorrow morning.
We then decided to head over to the local nursery to pick out our Christmas tree.  Still in positive spirits we were bound to save the day. We were no farther than 100 yards from our school when I heard Ed yell.  I was talking to Caden and not paying attention until I heard and felt a terrible THUD under the car.  We had hit (and killed) a cat.  Ed pulled over just to make sure that there wasn't anything we could do, and there obviously was nothing we could do.  I won't go into details, but I will say a few cars passed after us and the cat disappeared. Seriously, who does this happen to?
Then we finally made it to the nursery and it was raining out.  We proceeded to try and enjoy this once a year experience despite the fact that we were getting wet, there were mud puddles everywhere and we were all, at this point, in a pretty terrible mood.  We took Caden inside the gift shop and lied to him and told him it was Santa's workshop.  His little eyes were huge, he had a sweet smile on his face and he kept saying how amazing it was.  Jackson just squirmed in our arms and wanted to run after his brother.

Definitely not the day we had planned, but still a decent day.  Tomorrow, we will try again to go have breakfast with Santa.  Our driver has promised to be much more alert.

 Look at Caden's face.  He was looking around at everything and taking it all in.  It was so cute!

 Caden's feet are NOT touching the ground in the above picture.  He was just a little excited.

 We taught Caden how to say "I Love You" in sign language.  If you look at his fingers he is throwing out the I LOVE YOU in the picture.

 This my friends, is the amazing tree that we ended up coming home with.  Seems fitting after everything else that happened today, right?

 Jackson loved being in the middle of the action this year and walked around with the broom and the dust pan for most of the morning.  

This is a sad, tired, Caden who didn't understand why we didn't have any presents for him.  This whole Christmas process has a lot of different step to it that I guess can be very confusing to a three year old. :(

** After much debate about what to do about the cat Ed called to report the horrible accident to the local police station.  He really wanted to go knocking door to door trying to find the owner of the cat.  The fact that the car behind us drug the cat away made it difficult to explain the cat was no where to be found (we drove 2 miles looking for it)  If anyone reading this post happened to lose a cat today on Rt. 71 in Sea Girt.  We are very sorry for your loss.  We have two dogs at home that we love dearly and would be terribly heartbroken if anything happened to them.  We truly are so very sorry for your loss**