Christmas Break

This is the first year of our adult lives that we did not have to travel for Christmas!  On top of that, the kids had an extra long break from school - over two full weeks.  You can fit a lot of fun in that amount of time!

We started off with a trip to the downtown Akron library to stock up on books.

We checked out the new Akron Children's Museum.  I was worried there wouldn't be enough to keep Micah busy, but he really enjoyed building lego cars to race (below), building chain reaction paths, and even the arts and crafts.

Gramme and Poppa arrived on Wednesday night.  With their help, the kids got to try ice skating for the first time.

Christmas morning #1

 Christmas morning #2  (I put on "Charlie Brown Christmas" while we waited for the rest of the parents to wake up.)

matching Gramme-jammies

When you have a cousin only 6 weeks apart from you, you get a lot of the same gifts.  :) 

We introduced the kids to "pictionary".   For me it was part fun, part torture.  :)  But the kids loved it, especially Hannah and Natalie.

The confused looks on Meredith, Poppa, and Lucy make me laugh.  :) 

She fell asleep!

We only got a little bit of snow, but we still went sledding.

The Gurley and Hay kids playing Catan Jr.  while the adults play the real version.  It's only a matter of time before they try to join our game!

Portland

I know, I still haven't posted Christmas pictures.  I will.  But first: Scott and I went to Oregon this weekend!  Scott's cousin Elizabeth (aka: Biffy) was getting married in Portland.  The very generous Oysters were willing to watch the kids, and we were able to travel cheaply by taking advantage of Scott's points again.  We got to see Dick and Cathy, Julie and Laurie, and meet our newest niece Ainsley (as well as other extended family).  

I took zero pictures.  I stole this one from facebook.

I say that any time we're together without the kids, it's a date.  So, even though we spent most of the time travelling, it was still a lot of fun.  We got to eat out, relax, read, and watch shows together on the plane.  

Just a quick funny story, though.  I actually checked the weather before we left, and saw that it would be in the 30's with maybe an inch of snow on Saturday.  Great, no problems, I thought.  Well, I learned something new this weekend.  Did you know that Portland doesn't really get snow?  Like maybe 3 inches in the whole year?  So, a forecast of one inch caused a PANIC!  It was all the locals could talk about.  They were all in a tizzy.  Biffy's hairdresser actually cancelled on her!  And it wasn't even snowing yet!!!  

(To be fair, there was some validity to their concern.  Because they don't have the means to care for the roads, a combination of warmer then colder weather resulted in dangerously icy roads. But that wasn't until the evening.  That hairdresser has no excuse.)  One by one, all the out-of-town guests started getting notified that their flights had been cancelled, including us.  There were no flights out on Sunday, and precious few on Monday.  As I tried not to panic about not getting home to the kids until Tuesday, my amazing husband came to the rescue. (All this was going down between the ceremony and reception while they were doing pictures.  We had an airline person on the phone and couldn't risk losing them, so Scott posed for the photographer with the phone up to his ear, just removing it quickly when she took the shot.)

Scott found a flight leaving out of Seattle, Washington (a 3 hour drive) the next day and booked us a rental car.  Since the ice was predicted to just get worse over night, we decided to drive up that night after the reception and stay at a hotel by the airport.

  Meghan earned her sainthood by volunteering to keep the kids for the extra time, then taking them to our house to sleep.  Another amazing friend got them to bed and slept on my couch until we got home at 1am.  Oh, and between the two of them, the kids' laundry was done and unpacked, lunches were ready for school the next day, and my whole house was vacuumed.  What?? 

I made a little picture of our travels:

date on an airplane

 The kids while we were gone:

mm, ice cream...

Meghan sent me this picture Sunday afternoon and said "See there's nothing to having 6 kids. 1 playing, 2 napping, 3 watching football"

kids are like cats - can't resist sitting in a box

 I'm thankful we got to have an adventure.  It's nice to feel like a fun person again, instead of just a boring mom.  It also made me excited to get back to my boring life.  Now, I just need to get back on east coast time, so I'm sleeping at midnight instead of writing blog posts....