December 20th - Live Nativity

A big BUST...details tomorrow.

Here are the details...we fed the kids an early dinner and dressed them warm to go out to this Live Nativity that I had seen in the Denton City Calendar. I had in my mind pictured "Follow the Star" (the Live Nativity put on by our church in California) it was bright, well lit, with lots of people. We got the directions and started driving. The park where it was being held was in an area we weren't familiar with. So we drove there and after a little bit of searching we saw about ten people standing in a dark parking lot with Mary and Joseph huddled in the manger. No animals. Just people staring at people. I was so dissapointed. By this time the kids had both fallen asleep in the car, so I just couldn't picture us as the only audience with two screaming kids. We drove on by, and then because the kids had fallen asleep I needed to find something for them to do so that we could get them worn out enough again to go to bed.

We ended up at the Golden Triangle Mall in Denton. I have never been there before, although some friends of ours affectionately call it the Ghetto Mall. We walked around for a little while and ended up at Barnes and Nobles to look at the books and read to the kids for a little while. FYI - all those parents out there with train lovers beware...they have a train table in the kids section. We let Brody play there for a while, and I was VERY impressed with how well he was sharing with the other kids. But, another little girl was being mean and not sharing and taking the trains away from Brody. (You can see where this is going, right?) I saw where it was going - it was going to lead to Brody doing something naughty to get a train back - so we tried to cut it off. Brandon picked him up and we decided it was time to go. Brody screamed and screamed and screamed. It was horrible. I drug him thru the mall, past Santa (which provided no distraction), out in the freezing parking lot back to the car - all the while he was screaming. It didn't end up well, but while we were at the bookstore we did buy a Super Why Christmas book. I saw on another friends blog that they have a tradition of getting one new Christmas book each year. I thought that was pretty cool, so we decided that we would do that too. So our live nativity night was a big bust, but what do you do?