Convenos Christmas party

It was pure chaos for me. Chasing after little Nikolai the whole time. We did get one great snapshot, though.

TAKE THAT, Santa.

The only mall that's within realistic travel distance from us is the Capitola mall. It's a tiny little mall with a pathetic selection of stores, and almost as many empty store stalls as occupied ones these days. In spite of its lack of glory, the people who make the decisions around there found probably the best Santa I've ever seen anywhere, never mind in a mall. I've often thought "Figures. Just my luck I have the child who will never consider sitting on Santa's lap, and my pathetic mall has the best Santa alive."
As it turns out I was wrong.
We've been at the mall quite a few times recently, and each time we're there he asks to go see Santa. He'll walk around the Santa area coyly and peek at the big man in red. He'll watch all the other children walk up and sit on his lap, but until tonight has said "no" very clearly when I've asked if he wants to give it a go. Tonight was no different, until when I asked him if he wanted to go sit on Santa's lap he whispered "Yeah".
Maybe I jumped on it too quickly, or maybe he was just answering yes to the voices in his head, and the "yeah" had nothing ot do with the question I had posed. Tough to tell. At any rate, I jumped on the chance. We got in line and once standing up there he either chickened out or had no idea what was supposed to happen. After a bit of nudging on my part and beckoning on Santa's part Nikolai actually walked up to Santa, and Santa picked him up onto his lap.
He was very clearly having one of his painfully shy moments, and really did not know what to make of the situation. He was sitting on Santa's lap staring straight ahead looking as if he was facing the business end of an 18 wheeler.
The photographer and I were jumping up and down frantically waving our hands and yelling "SMILE NIKOLAI! SMILE!" and so he looked over and gave us this look:

And then prompty farted on him.

From my limited view, what it looked like was that after a while Nikolai let out a huge raspberry. Santa said "Oh my! You exploded!" and Nikolai just died laughing. What I didn't know (Santa divulged this tidbit to me later) was that Nikolai had exploded out of both ends. I guess he won't be getting that Thomas the Tank Engine Firehouse he requested for Christmas. Good ol' Santa gave Nikolai a very big hug and Nikolai climbed down off his lap and ran to me.