A Texas Christmas - Family Fun

My parents moved to Texas in October and we spent Christmas with them. The kids were of course super excited about the airport and airplane rides.  They were awesome travelers, toting their own backpacks and pretty obedient the entire trip.

On the bus from the parking to the airport. They were THRILLED to be on the bus, to say the least.

 

Looking for our airplane

When we arrived at Grammie & Pappy's temporary apartment, they had all kinds of ornament projects for the kids to make and hang on their little tree.

Pappy & Grammie converted their garage into an indoor playplace, with the trampoline and reading fort and a bunch of toys they dug out of storage. They wisely covered 90% of the walls & floor in cardboard boxes so the kids didn't leave too much damage.

Christmas placemats

Making waffles with Pappy

Our first big outing was to the Natural Bridge Wildlife Ranch - a ranch that has a drive-thru safari. It was pretty cool to feed all sorts of native-to-Africa animals through the vehicle's windows.  There were multiple warnings to not roll your windows down too low and drop food on the ground rather than hand-feed, and we pretty much stuck to the rules.

The cars ahead of us didn't mind feeding the animals within their cars.

Baby zebra!

After about 2 hours driving and feeding the animals, we stopped at the goat petting area. This was Amelia's one-and-done; for some reason she wanted nothing to do with them after this.

Goat obviously knew Pappy had more food in that bag.

Austin LOVED this and brushed the goats so happily.

Story about the legend of the Christmas trees (and star)

Letting Austin put the star on top of the tree (Amelia did it last year).

Aunt Lori came and gave everyone haircuts while she was there

We also visited the DoSeum, a children's museum. The kids made a beeline for the part that's set up with kid-sized stores and activities. This airplane was the favorite. Both of them stayed in it the longest and asked to return before we left.

Cousin Eli (2 months) getting a ride on the airplane too

This was pretty cool - you slid the stuffed dog through and it showed that she had puppies in her tummy through the machine screen.

"Ice/Snow" room

Even big kids had fun doing some of the activities

Daddy had too much fun in this exhibit

Maybe Mommy did too...

Since it was amazingly warm Texas weather before Christmas, we got to really enjoy the outdoor part of the museum.

Mommy & Daddy had fun on the robotics floor too

It's hard to see but the kids had a lot of fun making simple paper helicopters and putting them in the air machine. The yellow blur on the left side of the photo is Amelia's. We actually brought them home and they've played with them since.

The ball room was also a hit.

Austin & Pappy being silly in the wind tunnel

One evening we took Austin to the hotel pool to play. 

But the hot tub was like warm bathwater, so we let him get in there with us. And he loved it. So the boys had fun spraying hot tub water into the big pool for awhile (and no one else was there so they could be as goofy as they wanted).

Christmas Morning

Baby Eli spent Christmas morning just like this, oblivious to the fun but content as could be

Helping Great Grammie with her presents and cards

So every year my folks do some kind of game or project that must be completed to get our christmas gift. As the kids are getting older, their games are creative and include them. So this year's theme was a series of "Minute-to-Win-It" type activities. We had a selfie booth.

A "Holly Jolly" memory game

A Marshmallow Toss - which afterwards Austin gathered them up and 'cooked' in the kitchen

And then the kicker - our christmas money was in small bills, individually rolled inside random straws in boxes of many, many straws. Let's just say there were many exclamations of "Austin! Not yet!" as he tried to play with straws before we triple-checked that there was no cash inside. :) It was pretty fun. The kids actually played with all of these straws for days.

The microphone and guitar led to hours of entertainment after Christmas morning. 

Poor apartment neighbors!

Christmas lunch - Amelia and I had got to sit together at the island

Baby Eli woke up and was giggling at Great Grammie during lunch

We might have played with the selfie stick and props a few more times...

We headed out one evening to a ranch that puts on its own massive light show.

Spent a morning at the hotel indoor pool. This boy had to be continually reminded that the hot tub was now really hot and feet were all that was allowed inside. But he loved it!

Jumping in over and over and over to Daddy

Just in case they're famous one day...

We fit in some family dominoes

Headed one morning to the Natural Bridge Caverns. The first tour of the day was delayed by about 45 minutes so we purchased some playing cards in the gift shop and passed time playing go fish.

Amelia attached herself to Uncle Steel for most of the cavern tour.

Let's tackle Daddy while standing on an unguarded precipice.

Aunt Lori was able to sneak in a few books before leaving.

The day before we were scheduled to leave, we helped Pappy take down the trampoline.

At 3am on the morning we were supposed to fly out, I received a text that our flight had been cancelled. It took Patrick a few hours even at that hour in the morning to find a flight that had 4 seats available, so we ended up staying 2 days extra.  The kids didn't seem to mind and Grammie found many fun things to fill our days. Like a bubble machine indoors!

We taught Amelia how to play Uno. So now she can play with the adults. It was actually a lot of fun and we've played a few times at home now.

Patrick and I took the kids to a nearby park and trail for a few hours. They had a lot of fun climbing on these rocks. 

The trail had this gym equipment in stations along it. The kids thought it was more fun than the playscape.

Mommy was showing Austin how to use the pushup bars when Daddy cut in. So we got Amelia to tape it.

Perk of the delay (flying home on Jan 1) was that Daddy was able to watch the semi-final college football games on a real tv.

Bye-bye Texas! 

It was a jam-packed 2 weeks of fun! The kids still frequently pretend airplane flight and animal safari. Thanks Mom & Dad for taking such great care of all of us (and the many nights you cared for 3 grandchildren so we could get complete nights of sleep!)

Pre-Christmas Fun

We crammed a lot into the week before we left NJ for our Christmas holiday, being that the kids were finally over the worst of their sicknesses (although Austin ended up with an ear infection that I didn't know about until later since there was no fever or crankyness!).

The unseasonably warm weather that everyone had was awesome for riding bikes - and Amelia's first adventure on her new bike with training wheels. She was stoked.

Family outing to the park - after a long walk, we stopped to throw stones in the river.

Mom- dirty hands!

She dragged this branch into the water and had fun beating the water for awhile.

Amelia pulled out this other branch from the river and spent considerable effort to remove all of the debris and leaves attached to it. She actually cleaned it out by the time that we left.

We drove to see the zoo christmas lights. While I didn't get any good ones of the kids and the lights, they did enjoy visiting animal friends.

Llamas

First family train selfie

Our Community Bible Study had a little Christmas show for the moms. I thought for sure that Austin would come running to me as soon as they paraded them out (since he was the youngest of the group), but he sang with gusto and hand motions.

Amelia's preschool Christmas pageant - she's in the 3rd row, right next to the wall. Her class was all dressed up as lambs; she sang songs but wasn't too enthusiastic. I think she was more distracted by looking at everyone around her. 

Her preschool only allows the class mom to attend parties; our class mom couldn't make it so I had the opportunity to go in and meet the other kids and stick around for the party and some games and a book afterwards. It was a fun time.

A Slow Beginning to December

After all the busyness and fun of November, December has been surprising slow on the activities front, but busy on the somebody-is-sick front. The kids have gotten back into our routine and are enjoying the unseasonably warm weather we've had off-and-on for the last 2 weeks.

A few photos of our goofyness these weeks.

When we first returned from our Peru trip, we gave the kids the sleep masks we had. They have been loving playing with them.

 My mom had sent me a link to a website that has fun activities to do with different books. There is a book called "Too Much Glue" that looked cute. I never dreamed the kids would become obsessed over it once we got it from the library and ask to read it about 6x an hour. But we made the fun craft and they are still talking about it.

Big kid helping me make meatballs

They asked if they could watch football while we were eating dinner. 

A little family park outing - playing 'pooh sticks'. It's so much fun to see what type of things kids remember from books and ask to do.

We've finally figured out how to teach him to keep his hands off the ball - hands in hoodie pockets.

A quick mall run ended up including fun at the lego store.

Mr. Rohit & Mrs. Ishita came over one evening and the kids basically led him to the couch and presented him with books to read.

While clothes are optional, he quickly figured out that sitting  next to the heat vent was preferable.

We've been taking walks around the neighborhood to look at Christmas lights. The kids love to point out which lights are new, which are their favorites and which aren't turned on yet.

We had a rough week where Amelia had bronchitis and Austin fought off croup. But they're actually at an age where 5 pj days at home were still full of fun playing. I was surprised that I really didn't pull out that many special activities because they were so content with many of the 'new' christmas books and toys and their regular toys.  We had one morning where we started building houses from duplos and ended up with a duplo city that they played with all day.

I was cleaning up lunch one day and they called out to me "Mommy, come look! We made an L!"  Too funny.

In the middle of daily bickering I still turn around to find these sweet moments.

Aunt Diane - we have to tell you the funny story about your Christmas gifts. They arrived in their LLBean box and the kids asked if they could open it. I hesitated and suggested we wait until we were opening other gifts.  Amelia takes the box and stares at the printed packing slip and says "It's a sled!". Sure enough, the word 'sled' was printed on the paper among many other words and somehow she noticed it.  We didn't know she could sight read 'sled' and asked how she knew it - she pointed out that it's in a few of her christmas/winter books. So they were able to open their sleds early and have been pulled around the house many times.  Thank you!

Still fitting into small spaces.