It's Christmas Time in the City

Norah loves Curious George. Her current favorite episode is the one in which George and The Man With the Yellow Hat take the subway to the zoo (and hijinks ensue-imagine that!) She had been asking for a while to ride the subway, so we thought we would pretend that BART was a subway (hey, it's close) and take her up to San Francisco to see the holiday goings on at Union Square.

Now, I must really love this kid because I stay as far away from Union Square as humanly possible during the holidays. It isn't that I don't like the festivities-far from it-it's that I can't stand the massive crush of people that are packed into a 4 block radius at any given moment in time from Thanksgiving to New Years.

Anyway, I bought Norah a $10 velvet dress at Target that she calls her "ballerina" dress and demands to wear all the time, and she really wanted to visit Santa, so we figured we could kill 3 birds with one stone.

We drove up the BART station where, of course, the trains were all delayed and it was windy as hell. She insisted on being in charge of the "subway" tickets (we actually just let her hold the receipt).


The train finally got there and she was more than happy to gaze lovingly out the window for about 5 minutes. Then she wanted to watch Toy Story 2 on my phone.


It turned out to be a kind of cold and rainy evening, so it was lucky that the BART goes straight to the SF Westfield Centre and you don't even have to walk outside. It's an immense place and pretty impressive. Of course, any kind of mall totally overstimulates BVZ and gives me minor panic attacks (oh, the crowds!) so we were quite a pair. Norah was really into it though and we headed straight for Santa.

The dome was decked out in holiday lights and was pretty spectacular.

Norah wanted to watch Santa for a while before she headed up there.

She did great (see previous post for photographic evidence). Now, the whole Santa picture business is a racket. I understand that they want you to buy their picture-that's the whole point. But, if I am spending $30 on two 5 by 7 pictures, you would think I would be allowed to snap a few with my digital camera, right? No way. It was a no camera, no cell phone zone, which was reaaaaalllly obnoxious.

After Santa we went to find dinner and oh.my.god. The people. The throngs and throngs of people. BVZ really wanted to eat at our friends' restaurant (a gourmet sausage joint), but we literally thought we would lose our lives if we tried to push through the mall crazies.

So we ate at some fancy pizza place.


After dinner I knew there was no way I could get back on BART without at least breathing outside air so we threw caution to the wind and decided to brave Union Square. The rain had thankfully stopped and Norah was immediately enamored with all the festivities.

She was really bummed she couldn't touch the tree (guard rails).

And really wanted to ice skate.



We ducked into the St. Francis and I had a minor heart attack when we discovered that my all time favorite SF restaurant Michael Mina had moved to another location (another MM joint called Bourbon Steak was in its place). It made me feel really out of touch. But then Norah screamed "look, it's a ginger-HEAD house" and I felt better again.

She found a tree she could touch.


She was super cute the rest of the night and we stopped at every street musician so she could give them a dollar. She was so wound up on the train ride home that she did a tap dance for all of the other passengers.

The next day she wanted to make Christmas cookies. I had picked up a mix (complete with icing and sprinkles) from Trader Joe's the week before, so we did that.

They were pretty gross. I don't recommend the Trader Joe's mix (complete with icing and sprinkles). Thankfully, BVZ's standards aren't really that high and they didn't last long.

Christmas with a 2.5 year old pretty much rules.