After our death-defying journey to get out to my parents for Christmas, the rest of our break seemed very relaxing and we had a lot of fun. We enjoyed two weeks with my family and were even able to stop to visit Ryan's bro, sis and brother-in-law on the way back home. Here are just a few of the things we did:
We baked, and ate, and baked, and ate, and baked, and ate again. Did I mention we baked...and then ate? Ryan and I decided that staying at my parents at Christmas is like living in a bakery where a new (or a couple new) delicacies are made every day for our eating enjoyment. Yes, we did enjoy them but our waistlines did not. Here Grant is helping me decorate some sugar cookies.
Christmas morning was great, the boys loved their presents. We all loved our presents. Ryan actually exclaimed with joy "This is the best Christmas ever!" after opening
The Thunder Ranch Defensive Shotgun Tactics DVD, a rotating waffle iron, a Glenn Beck book, Blokus, and a church book he wanted, among other items. He did get a good stash this year...
Tate "opening" his barn toy. As you can see, the real Christmas morning enjoyment is wrapping paper to tear and boxes to climb on.
Grant loved his garbage truck with working trash can lift. Thanks Papa and Munga (Grant's names for my parents).
Ryan worked on becoming a real Wood-man over the break by not shaving. He and several of his co-residents thought it would be fun to not shave over their break and then come up with weird facial hair styles as they shave it off. He's promised to post with the results later.
My brothers, Ryan and David, came home from BYU and entertained us with a little Blue Grass music. Grant is doing a little dosie-doe around Tate although it was more lively than it appears in this picture.
Grant put his tool-set Christmas present to good use by working on the old swing set a little.
Other fun picture-less activites included: shopping at the Williamsburg Outlets, going to see Sherlock Holmes and catching one more showing of New Moon with my mom, putting a 500-piece and 750-piece puzzle together, ordering 54 chicken wings and finishing them all between 4 people, watching movies, sleeping in, eating delicious dinners, and all of our regluar Christmas traditions.
We ended the vacation with a near hospital trip as Tate tripped in the kitchen, hit his chin and forehead on a shelf in the kitchen island and bit his tongue pretty badly. As you can see he's got quite the set of buck-teeth and they did some damage on his little tongue. It seemed pretty bad right after his fall as blood gushed out of his mouth. But the bleeding stopped after a few minutes or so, and he was fine. The pic above is of Tate 20 minutes after his fall, laughing and getting tickled.
On the way home we stopped in West Virginia to visit Ryan's brother, sister, and brother-in-law. We ate an awesome dinner & breakfast with them and topped off "the best Christmas ever" by receiving 4 gorgeous, original colored-pencil drawings by Ryan's sister (clockwise from top-left, they are a water lily, orange lily, forget-me-nots, and orchids) and the giant, blue, fuzzy blanket that Ryan's family grew up with and that Ryan's sister had re-made with new batting & backing. It was awesome to see the sib's again, though I realized too late that we didn't get any pics with them! Blast!
The trip home was uneventful, thank goodness. We were actually pretty sad to leave this time as it seemed like the first real relaxing we have done in a long time. But now it's back to the grind and the cold Ohio winter.
Ryan convinced a few of his co-residents to not shave over the Christmas break and then to come back and compare their facial foliage. They called it "Don't-Shave-December". After the post-Christmas comparison each person could then decide what to do with their man-hair. Ryan held true to the deal and grew more facial hair than he's ever had in his life. He even held on to it for an extra week after returning to school. I had actually started getting used to it. But when the time to shave finally arrived, Ryan couldn't bring himself to make a clean break with his new-found manliness. The following series of photos were the result. (He wore each of these to school for a day.)
