December 2014

December  in  a  nutshell

Ø Nik had a Christmas Sing-a-long program at his preschool.  It was fun to watch him in class and I videoed it so that Ryan could watch it later.

Ø For Christmas this year Grandma and Grandpa Dance bought us plane tickets to fly out to Idaho for Christmas.  We were all so so very excited.  We decided that Santa needed to come early to our house so that we wouldn’t have to bring all of the presents with us as we traveled.  Nik thought this was a great idea.  We made Santa some yummy German cookies and a big glass of milk.  When Nik woke up in the morning he was so excited.  He saw that Santa had brought him an awesome Marble Mania toy and had filled his stocking, plus all the other wrapped presents under the tree.  Nik couldn’t wait to open gifts, and immediately started playing with them all.  Ian was just happy to play with whatever he could get his hands on.

Ø Just before leaving for our trip out West, Ryan stepped in a strategically placed dog poop and walked all through the house depositing it everywhere.  I was so very pleased, not!  I was ticked!  So we spent the night scrubbing dog poop out of the carpet and then cleaning the carpets.  You would think that after all this, the experience would not repeat itself.  Wrong.  Just moments before leaving, as we were taking the luggage out to the truck of our Home Teacher, both Ryan and our home teacher stepped in a pile of dog poop and walked through the house with it.  Awesome!!!!!

Ø Flying always stresses me out when doing it with kids.  I want it to go smoothly and inevitably it rarely does.  After spending all day traveling, on the day before Christmas Eve, we finally arrived in Salt Lake.  It was late and we were all pretty spent, but were excited to be back in the West and about to see our families.  We went to go to our rental car, and there was the most rank fart musk radiating from every fiber of that car.  We have dubbed it the ‘Fart Car”.  It was pungent, and rank and I can only imagine the guy who prepared the car for us thinking it would be so funny to let one off in the car right before closing the door and letting it marinate for the poor sucker who would inevitably enter the car.  Boys.  Ugg.

Ø I was so excited to see my family, whom I had not seen for 6 months or more.  It was so great seeing everyone and being together.  We had big family dinners, ginger bread house competitions, cousins cousins and more cousins, sledding with the four wheelers, bowling, movies, shopping, plenty of wrestling and chasing, big toy car racing, family pictures, plenty of games and last but not least the influenza.  We all had a blast, but unfortunately I caught the flu half way through our holiday.  It was a major set back, but in the end it was still nice to just be there with my family.

Sadly, it came time for us to leave.  I was still ill, but was trying to be optimistic about the whole travel thing.  We drove to Grandma and Grandpa Whitesides and were going to party with the whole family for the new years.  Unfortunately, I fell asleep through the whole event, but it sounded like everyone had a great time.  Boyd and Gayle are always so wonderful and it was so good to spend some time with them.  We wish it could have been longer, but hopefully we can see them soon and can spend more time with them.

The next day was the big travel day.  We went to the airport and learned that the rest of the nation was also traveling on that same day.  Yay for us!  We already knew that it would be a long day of travel with a 3 hour lay over in Denver, but we ended up having a 2-hour layover in Salt Lake and then a 5-hour lay over in Denver.  After finally arriving in Chicago, we retrieved most of our luggage, and went to go retrieve our car seat s from the odd sized luggage belt.  I was so excited, I looked over and Ian’s car seat was the first out.  It was sitting in a big tub and without thinking, we grabbed it and started putting it together and left the big black tub on the belt.  Little did we realize that we were supposed to take it off the belt.  The entire conveyer belt halted to a stop and shut down with a resounding clank as the conveyer belt door slammed shut.  Yup, you guessed it, my family and I had single handedly shut down the conveyer belt at the airport, leaving us and about 15 other people stuck without their items.  You can only imagine all the glaring and hushed comments aimed at us.  Oh the joys of traveling.

Ian and Paxton sitting on Grandma and Grandpa's lap.