Christmas (Yep, it's March…)

For the past three months I've thought about how I needed to write down our first Christmas with all our girls home. Things happened and blogging didn't.

Here it is:

Justin checked out of his command in the middle of December, I took off work and pulled Claire out of school a few days early. We left Hawaii on a night flight and landed in Texas after an uneventful flight. It was glorious. Thankful for my dad and his frequent flyer mile upgrades. The travelers around us looked scared to death when they saw us wheeling the girls on and Claire. Like always though they complemented us after the 8 hour flight.

When we got to Texas, Justin and I took a little road trip to Fredericksburg for a mini vacation away from the girls. My mom kept them in Kingwood for us and we had a great time. We stayed at the Hoffman Haus and it was lovely. So quiet and peaceful for three days. We enjoyed good food, drinks and shopping. Well I enjoyed the antique shopping…Justin not so much. On our way back we stopped at Buc-ee's and Junk Gypsy's headquarters. I was in heaven!

Two weeks is never enough time in Texas, but we made the most of it and kept busy the whole time. Everyone else in Texas seemed to have the flu in some form….always right after we saw them, but none of the girls got sick. Thank God!

We spent the majority of our time in Kingwood with my parents. Christmas morning was fun this year. Claire was super excited to open presents and kept yelling "OH WOW!!". The best present was the daddy dolls. I made Justin pose in is uniform a few months ago, sent the picture of a company and out came a 17 inch doll of Justin. The girls love them.

 

That is for sure a chair tipped over to block the kitchen. The twins destroyed it daily. 

Kim and Jared came in for a few days and that is always fun to see them. Claire loves playing with them and I love watching them all interact. The boys also got to go to Rockets game with my dad's company tickets. It looked like fun.

We went to Justin's sisters our in Katy one afternoon and had Christmas with her family and his mom. We took the kids to a super fun park and let them run around for awhile. It made me realize that we don't have any big parks in Hawaii and how badly I wish we had some swings! We also had the Brown Christmas with his dad's side of the family one night.

We got to see our friends, the Voigt's, at the Houston airport for an hour on Christmas day. That was so needed. We met in Hawaii when the husbands were stationed together on the Pasadena. Since meeting we've added 6 kids to our bunch, they've moved twice, and we hadn't seen each other in about 3 years. It was so good to see them.

We enjoyed seeing all of our family and friends over the course of two weeks. I'm so glad that we are able to have the ability to travel back and forth a couple times a year.