Free pics w/ Santa

Here's what came in a flyer to my house: "Visit Santa in Downtown Renton at his house at the southwest corner of S 3rd St and Wells Ave S on Fridays and Saturdays from December 7 - 22. Enjoy free downloadable pictures with Santa on Fridays from 5 - 7 pm and Saturdays from 1 - 4 pm. Stroll the streets of downtown to shop and enjoy the festive storefront window displays. Sponsored by the Downtown Events Committee. For more information, contact Toni Nelson at 425-226-6124."

So we went down to the Piazza today w/ the kiddos and saw Santa. Poor guy was basically in an unheated decorated shed but you know, the pics were free, so we had to check it out. We went at around 2:45pm today and there was only one person in front of us (sure beats the mall lines!) The santa was just ok- fake beard and painted white eyebrows but my kids didn't seem to care. A nice lady took a bunch of pics and didn't seem annoyed that we'd also brought our own camera. She then gave us some free coloring pages and a postcard w/ info on how to retreive our free pics. I wasn't able to see them today but the card does say it can take up to 48 hours. What's a little weird to me is that the pics are out there for all the world to see. I'm very private about stuff like that, you'll notice I never even use my family's names on this site in fact, but I know I'm probably just slightly more paranoid than other people and supposedly after 60 days the pics are viewable anymore so I'm not going to stress over it. I'll report back when the pics are up and let you know whether I think they turned out. After seeing Santa, we stopped by the "cupcake place", a review of which is forthcoming.

kidspot rating: 2.0

UPDATE: Ok so the pics are online now. I swear the gal snapped the camera at least 10 times but there are just 4 pics of our family. I figure they just left out the really bad ones, which is fine. It's still a little weird to me that anyone can see the pics but whatver. They gave us a postcard when we left that said what number our pics are. When you go to the website, you just scroll through the images until you find the one(s) w/ your number. Of the four, one actually came out pretty decent. Better than the ones hubby took w/ our camera so I can't complain really. The background is not that impressive though- Santa's chair is in a corner and so you see that behind him. There are some holiday-themed decorations painted on the wall but it's not like the pics are centered or framed around anything in particular so it's kind of odd. Still, it's free and my kids aren't crying in in the pic so that's good enough for me! Oh and one more thing, it appears that they've got more than one Santa there. The other guy has a real beard (grayish white and kinda' short) but still fake hair.