Sickmas

Not the best Christmas on record.

 Coco is on his mission, so we were missing a key member of the family, and every last one of us came down with the worst cold/flu/sinus infection any of us has ever had. The boys had it all last week, Baga caught it last Thursday, Baba caught it on Friday, Kenny caught it on Saturday, and I caught it Christmas night (which I was very grateful for--at least I felt good through the morning!). To make matters worse, we have had to cancel a much-anticipated trip down to Utah to visit Opa D, Mere Mere, and the Young grandparents.

So everything was just a little...dimmed. A little less delicious, a little less fun, a little less jovial and jolly and exciting. Sickmasses are the worst.

But still, Christmas is Christmas! We are eternally grateful for our Lord and Savior who came to earth for us and will always love this time of year for the joy and time with family it brings!

And despite being sick, the boys still managed to be entertaining. Poor Luke lost so much weight being sick that Derek's pants were a little big on him.

Our nativity devolved into a tug-of-war over baby Jesus when he was kidnapped by a sheep and had to defended by Joseph...

and Derek helped open almost every single present there was. 

At the very least, given the experience, we can now enter 2018 grateful for our health!

Christmakkuh

Thanks, Jacksons, for all of your awesomeness.

We will miss you! See you in April for East-over? Pass-ter?

Whatever, it'll be great.

O Tannenbaum

Our first excursion out into the woods to cut down our own tree! Turns out Idaho is home to the awesome Ponderosa Pine, which must be the type of tree that Charlie Brown picked out because...

look how cute!

 *not shown: Luke's naked bum as he pees in the woods. 

Gingerbread Madness

i.e. Mostly candy eating by the boys.

Ken's contribution: the poor gingerbread man fell off of the roof while he was hanging Christmas lights.

Luke's been asking when we are going to eat it every day since!

Still Giving Thanks...

...since it doesn't officially happen until you blog about it.

And a big thanks to Mere Mere and Opa D for joining us! Especially for 

my and Luke's first turkey trot

our first Texas football game (go Rice Owls), and lots of board games and baseball playing and general merriment with the boys.

Hope we didn't wear you out too badly. 

Christmas Miracle

So this happened...

I must have finally gotten used to Houston weather, because we've been frozen for about three days!

Harvey, a world series win, and now snow. What's next Houston?

Bigger'n Dallas

Way way way before the holiday madness began, like a month ago, the boys and I drove Kenny up to  Dallas for a conference (a game one, not a business one) and then headed over to our swanky downtown hotel for some leisure time of our own. 

We walked the length of the cute little downtown area, visited the 6th Floor Museum, met up with some old friends, toured the arboretum, and ate some delicious, delicious food.

As usual, the boys made sure that Dallas would remember them.

For example: when we arrived at our awesome, valet-only, big and fancy hotel after a good four hours of driving or so and were handing our car keys over, I looked around and realized that our car (which is not normally the poster-child for cleanliness) was absolutely trashed, inside and out. And as the kind valet staff tried to help me out of the car, there were so many little things that I was trying to stuff into bags and haul upstairs that two or three gentlemen were picking things up with me, asking "is this coming with you?" over and over. To top it all off, as we were getting the boys out, both had filthy faces and clothes, courtesy of some road trip suckers. Thankfully, we got to relive the mortification everyday as they would bring our car around to the front--made especially embarrassing by the fact that every single other car brought around was luxury, and the front of the hotel was flanked by two or three of the owner's personal collector cars at all times. The boys also had a grand old time providing entertainment for the valet staff in the form of wrestling matches in the middle of the entrance door. 

The exact view (one floor up) Lee Harvey Oswald had when he took his shot (or did he...).

The Sixth Floor Museum was really pretty awesome. They're going for a reverent, library-like quiet and everyone is given headphones and a little player, so for the first hour or so the boys really did pretty well! Baby D had my headset and Luke had his own, so the silence was only broken by Luke occasionally coming up to me and yelling (since he headphones on), "Which number are you on??"But after that everything spiraled, and there was wrestling and running and yelling and crawling under the partitions to try to scare the other patrons. Good thing they were the only kids in there. 

We'd hate to have any competition.