Falling behind on the blog

Sorry for falling behind on the blog. The remaining portion of our trip consisted of many trips to the park and a New Years Eve celebration of parfaits and sparkling drinks.

Christmas day was fantastic. We spent the morning with Grandma and Papa. Later in the day everyone else arrived. We opened presents and had a great dinner. We attempted to get a family photo. It is not easy to get 21 people to stand still.

Christmas Eve

For Christmas Eve we went to mass, or tried to go to mass. Caitlin was not able to keep her mouth shut during mass. She was like Donkey in Shrek, yap yap yap. So we had to take her out of church. She then spent her time reaching up and trying to grab the stars so she could put them in a jar. We then had a tamale dinner and went back to the condo. There we put out cookies for Santa and went to bed.

Christmas Trip Begins

We had a very merry Christmas. The trip began with a fairly nice flight to Santa Barbara. The kids did well. The hardest part of the flights was finding allergen free food for Caitlin at the airport. Grandma and Papa Gizmo were at the airport waiting for us to arrive. The condo we rented had a bedroom and a den. It was nothing too fancy, but it met our needs for a cat free environment. We were able to celebrate Erin's birthday. We took a drive to visit Aunt Noella. We had not seen her since the passing of Uncle NoNo. Sue and Terry showed a moving retrospective video of his life. Then we prepared for Christmas. As always, pre-Christmas and Christmas are a lot of fun, but a little hectic. We went to Grandma's house every day. We decorated cookies and put up our small tree for the condo. I almost forgot about the weather. It rained everyday nonstop for a week.

Christmas Vacation

We are back from our Christmas vacation in California. We must have left in a hurry as the camera still had some nice pictures of Grandma visiting. We had a wonderful time with Grandma and are excited about her and Albie's visit in January.