We bought tickets to visit our families at Christmastime back in September, before we'd started seriously househunting and before we'd ever dreamed we'd be moved into a home before Christmas. By the time Christmas rolled around, we were stressed and tired with all the excitement and upheaval that comes from moving. But since we'd paid for these tickets already, we weren't backing out! And we of course were looking forward to spending time with our families. But every time we fly now, we have a serious conversation about how great life would be if someone had figured out how to Apparate, because of all the work and craziness involved with flying across the country every time we want to see our families. We also had a creepy/scary experience at the airport with someone trying to get our itinerary from the airline, which made all the traveling that much more enjoyable. But once we got to Irvine, we were glad to be there and to relax.
I feel like I probably say this every time I write about a trip to see our families, but every time it becomes more and more true--the best part about this trip was seeing Dane interact with our families and seeing how much he LOVES them and how much they love him. It is so, so much harder to travel with kids, but the rewards are so, so much more valuable to me. When I sit and think about it, I am blown away by how lucky Dane is to have such a loving (even obsessed!) family who can't wait to see him whenever he breezes into town. I was so glad we were able to get some good bonding time in this time of year, since we won't be visiting our families until summer, and we even got to do some fun things in each place too.
We flew into Irvine on Christmas Eve morning (cheap plane tickets that day!) and then, after getting Dane down for a nap, drove out to Riverside to meet the Myres cousins to see the Mission Inn. It's a very cool, old, historic hotel in Riverside (of all places!), which was actually really fun to walk around and sightsee at.
This is what it looked like inside--all courtyards and chapels and different levels and old architecture.
Serious Bethany, so spiritual in the chapel.
We then went back to my family's house for Christmas Eve dinner and traditions--including the candy game (where Aunt Sara reads the Christmas story with candy bars), the Nativity story, and a white elephant gift exchange.
Dane loved my family's big old snowglobe (again--he loved it last year too!).
Best part of the white elephant gift exchange was Bethany's hat--she got a hat, was disappointed, someone took pity on her and stole it, and then she opened another present and got ANOTHER HAT! I was very pleased with my Yoga Cats calendar.
On Christmas morning, Dane woke up at 5am (or thereabouts)--not because he was excited for presents (because he had no idea what was going on), but just because of the time difference. He and Tommy watched Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer on the couch for a while before the rest of the house started waking up.
Dane was SO excited about the first few presents he got. My dad got eight Thomas the train characters and put them out by everyone's stockings, so Dane saw them first thing in the morning when we came down. He would have been satisfied then and there, before opening a single present or even his own stocking. It was kind of downhill from there--he had this mountain of presents (just mostly small things wrapped individually) and after he'd opened about three, and got a Thomas the train for his wooden train track, he was DONE. He could not open a single other present and just contented himself with playing happily with ALL of his new trains while the rest of us opened the other presents.
This was what he was doing instead of opening his presents:
Let that be a lesson to me: one good present is better than lots of other presents. But it wasn't really my fault--I didn't know about all the "surprise" Thomases coming with our stockings and the other presents he was going to get from everyone else at the house. Spoiled boy!
We all got our hand plates from the Murphy family reunion this summer, from Grandma Murphy.
We skyped with Dallin--hooray!--and Dane took a nap, and then in the late afternoon we all went to the park and played in the sand (Dane), talked (me and my mom), and played volleyball (everyone else).
Dane is wearing his Christmas present from Miami that Camille and Brandon sent him. He was super pleased about it!
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