What I did on my Christmas Vacation (extended version)

So I don't really get a vacation. Afterall, my job is to be home taking care of the kid and until I can find someone else to step in and do that for a few days, I don't get a vacation. But we did get away for Christmas, at least for a few days, so Jason got a vacation.

Where did we go? Why didn't I say anything about it before? We flew to CT on Christmas. To surprise my parents. And it worked. They were surprised. We had a great time. We're never doing it again. That might not be totally true, but we don't plan to do it again. This year was easy because Michaela was too young to know that Santa came to our house a day early, but we might not be able to swing that again in the future. We sort of decided spur-of-the-moment to go (I think 3 weeks before counts as spur-of-the-moment when you're talking Christmas travel) and it was absolutely worth all the craziness of the whole thing!

The first bit of craziness was Christmas on Christmas Eve. This is what our tree looked like after Santa came:

This is all that came from Santa:

The rest was from family and friends. We feel very loved and very blessed.

It took three hours to open presents. With only one child (if you don't count Jason). That might not have happened had it not been for this:

That was from Mimi and Papa. They graciously got the one with the red accents so it would match my living room decor. I've resigned myself to the fact that children's toys have officially taken over my living room. But I'm crazy enough to want them to match. Michaela really likes it, too, which made it very difficult to get her to come back to the pile of presents to open anything else.

You'll notice the Powerwheels car in the picture above. Guess how many times she's actually ridden in it. Go ahead, guess.

Thank goodness I got a picture. This was it. It hasn't happened again. Before we moved it to the garage so the kids who came to our brunch yesterday wouldn't run into the furniture, she spent a lot of time standing by it saying, "I drive." But then as soon as we'd try to coax her into it and try to get her to actually drive it, she'd run away saying, "noooo." Good thing Santa brought her that!

I guess this guy is a little more her speed.

And monkey bread. Monkey bread was definitely a hit. We have monkey bread two times a year - Christmas and Easter. We couldn't let Christmas on Christmas Eve stop the tradition. I think Michaela is all for the tradition.

After all the craziness of Christmas Eve Christmas, we got to the business of actual Christmas Eve, which means church for us. On the way to church, the second bit of craziness hit us - our flights the next day were cancelled. Delta cancelled something like 300 flights through Atlanta due to the predicted bad weather. I'm not sure how bad it actually got, but at least they rebooked us through Charlotte on USAir. We were very pleasantly shocked about that. The only bad part of the whole thing was that our 9:15am flight was now a 6am flight. That meant getting up at 3am ourselves to get things going, and then waking the baby up at 4am. Thank goodness for a flight out of Mobile (the airport is literally less than 5 minutes from our house) and not Pensacola (which would've been an hour+ drive). And thank goodness for the USO in Charlotte. We had a long layover there and spent the bulk of it in the USO lounge relaxing and letting Michaela play in a gated-off area. And it was a quiet spot to call Mom and Dad so they wouldn't get suspicious!

Of course the next craziness was just trying to get to the front door at Mom and Dad's without them seeing us. It didn't work since Mom walked by the door right as I was running up to it. I heard "Oh my gosh! No way! No way!" from outside as she ran to the door. Definitely a successful surprise! Ryan was in on it, so he snapped a couple pictures. Not great ones, but better than nothing.

Then it got less busy and crazy for a few days. We got snowed on (not sure I liked that), but made it out just as easily as we made it in. All was going well on the return trip until the last bit of craziness. The kid puked. On final into Atlanta. All over herself. On her carseat. On her dad (thankfully I wasn't sitting next to her - he was!). So we used up a chunk of our short layover getting her cleaned up and changed (prepared mommy that I am, I packed extra clothes for her). We hoofed it to a different terminal for our flight to Mobile, with me carrying Michaela in the Beco carrier, and then took advantage of the early boarding for people with children. And then we were the last people on the plane anyway because she puked. Again. In the jetway. On me. Because she was attached to me and there was no way around it. Something made me leave her sweatshirt off when we changed her, so she only puked on her t-shirt and then rode shirtless to Mobile because we needed to make sure she had something to wear home. I guess with all the traveling we've done with her in her short life we're lucky this is the first time we've had this happen. I REALLY hope it's the last time. And for the record, she was totally fine by the next morning.

Since we got home last Wednesday, we just spent a lot of time getting the house ready for company. We hosted a New Year's Day brunch yesterday, so we had to get everything prepped (ie clean the house) for that and then enjoy some more craziness of having 15 adults and 8 kids ranging from 17 months (ours) to 9 years old in the house. It was definitely fun!

But it wore us out so we didn't get the Christmas decorations down like we planned. That worked out for the best, though, since I didn't have a single picture of Michaela in front of the tree this year and was able to get one of her in her cute church dress this morning before we took it all down.

So the dress isn't Christmas-y, but it's cute. And she's cute. And the tree is in the background.

Now the craziness is all over. Jason goes back to normal schedule at work tomorrow after being in a holiday status for the last two weeks (only working once every 3 days), and I'm back to the fun of entertaining the energizer bunny by myself!

Oh, and if you look over there to the right, you'll see a link to a new blog. I'm doing the 365 project if I can stay with it (Thanks for the idea, Melissa), so I started up a new blog tonight. I already started a day late, but I'm really going to try to stick with that one for the whole year!

So that's what I did on my Christmas vacation!