Christmas - Part Two

As I stated before, our Christmas was a little off-kilter with people sick.  Kip and Andrew( my brother, not brother in law) were sick Christmas day.  Andrew didn't even get to partake of our delicious steak dinner!  Too bad.  It was yummy!  Well, the next day (actually, sometime in the night) I woke up feeling not so chipper myself.  Uh-oh.  Great.  Just what I wanted - to get sick.  Whew.  It was terrible.  I had not been that sick in a long time.  And to make matters worse, that was the day we were all packing up and heading to the mountains!  I was dreading the drive.  Any of you who have driven in the Rocky Mountains may remember that the roads (especially the way we were going) are not what you would call straight.  Actually, they are quite the opposite!  We weren't leaving until around 2 that afternoon, so I spent all morning in bed (and in the bathroom - not that you wanted to know that!).  Some people went to church that day, while others stayed home.  I am very thankful for my mom, Amanda, and Danielle who helped with my kids while Matt was at church.

I had to laugh, though. Once everyone was home from church, it was a mad rush to get everything packed up in the cars.  Actually, let me back up a bit and explain what we were doing.

We had the idea to do something special for my parents' 40th wedding anniversary this past May.  That is a great milestone that few reach in today's world.  So we wanted to honor them.  My brother, Andrew, came up with the idea, did some research, and we all started planning for the past year and half for this.  When it was their anniversary in May, we told them that we were going to postpone the celebration until Christmas when we were all together.  Then we told them what we were doing.  We were renting a log cabin in Estes Park and our whole family was going to be together for 4 days.  My parents were shocked and super excited, as were we.  So, that is where we were headed.

We had 24 people to pack for 4 days (12 kids), and all the games, toys, and food that we would need for that time.  While I was upstairs in bed, everyone else was running around like mad getting things packed and in the 5 vehicles we needed to get us all there (I think next time we may look into renting a 15 passenger van or two!)  The commotion reminded me of the movie, Home Alone.  You know how at the beginning of both the movies the family oversleeps and they are running around in chaos getting ready to go?  Yup.  That was my family! :-)

Well, by the time we were ready to leave, I was feeling MUCH better.  I just made sure I sat in the front of one of the vehicles and kept my eyes looking as far ahead as I could.  The trip was about an hour from my parents' house.  We got to the cabin and were all amazed at how big and cool it was.  This was a massive house.  It has 9 bedrooms, 4 bathrooms, several large screen TVs, a game room complete with a small court basketball, air hockey and Foosball.  It had a pool table, a hot tub, the biggest soaker tub I have EVER seen (seriously - it was HUGE) and a ginormous shower in the master bedroom.  I'm talking 4 shower heads - one of which was a rain shower head.  So cool.  We were all like little kids - walking (and in some cases, running) around to each room, shouting out "cool!" and "look at this!"  It was kinda funny.

So, the next four days were spent there - all of us together.  Quite a few more people got sick there, including Matt and Liam.  But, we just relaxed, ate, watched movies, played games, went to the town of Estes which is a really cool mountain town with all kinds of tourist-y shops.

It was a great fun time of being together as a family.  My favorite part, though was each night we would all gather around in the living room and one of the guys would read from the Bible, then we would ask the kids questions and then sing songs.  It was so precious to hear all the cousins singing Jesus Loves Me and other songs together.  What a blessing to have so many Christian family members to share in that.  I am SO very thankful for my family, and how they are all saved.  And someday we pray that all our kids will too and we can always have that in common when we get together.  What a blessing.
After those 4 days we headed back and then just a few days later everyone started returning to their homes.  We left on Tuesday and got home here on Wednesday.  It was so nice to be gone, to spend time with my family.  But it was also nice to get back home.  And to my bed.  Ahh... I love my bed.
So that, in a nutshell (sort of - at least for me -ha!) was our Christmas.  Tune in either later today or tomorrow for our Christmas in pictures!  But for now, if you want to see a few short videos that my brother took, you can go to his blog site here.  Just scroll down a few posts and you will see the Christmas videos.

Until next time...