A Christmas and New Years Eve Recap!

Whew this has been a whirlwind Christmas! Here's a little recap.

We flew out to Texas very early in the morning, and like people who have done this before (which we are) we set our phone alarms for dark and early. Well, bless my optimistic heart, that just never seems to work when it's important.

The only reason we were close to being ready for the airport shuttle on time was this little guy.

Thanks for being too excited to sleep through the night buddy. For once, I really appreciated it.

We stopped by my Dad's warehouse on the way to the house, and John got to have all his greatest dreams come true.

He got to control the forklift himself too. Just the up and down part, not the driving part. 

I'm not crazy- we'll be waiting until he's AT LEAST five.

The faces of suspicion when we actually turned it on were pretty great.

Since the weather report said rain for days, we had our bonfire early.

My Ponca father lit it with the traditional...propane torch...

We're totally in touch with our heritage.

John turned out to be a champion marshmallow roaster. Kid has a scary amount of concentration when sugar is involved.

Remember that rain I mentioned. Yeah, well that was more like TEXAS WEATHER IS ABOUT TO GO BANANAS!

Observe.

That tornado watch section? That's where we were.

Except that watch became a tornado warning which became all the sirens going off.

So I calmly gathered up a bunch of pillows, blankets, and towels during the warning, and stuck the kids in the bathtub during the sirens. A lifetime of doing this for the win!

Being released from the bathtub!

In case you were concerned, we survived the tornado with no damage, but a lot of other people didn't. The Red Cross is on that if you want to help out.

The kids had a good Christmas Eve and Christmas.

Real quote from one of my sisters: "Can we take him to church like this?!" ....No....

Got to take the kids to my home parish, St. Thomas Aquinas in Dallas for Sunday mass, but we did the Cathedral Shrine of Our Lady of Guadalupe for Christmas Day mass. 

There was a bunch of hanging out and exploring Dallas after that, but I didn't take a lot of pictures. So I'm just going to jump to: we flew home on New Years Eve! 

And hosted the Young Adults group New Years Eve Party that evening.

Because there's no way that could have gone wrong.

But it didn't! It was awesome!

Downton Abbey inspired dress and jewlery. It's *technically* for a wedding, but I thought it would be fun for NYE too.

Matt made about 5 amazing appetizers, people came, lots of fun times.

The kids zonked out right on time. Being jetlagged is hard on little bodies. When I told Therese it was time for bed, she actually said "Yea, yea!!"

We had our champagne toast on the roof of our building while watching the fireworks across the Bay.

Not bad, not bad at all.