Utah Christmas Extravaganza

With my parents currently serving a mission at Church headquarters and Aaron's parents just north of that, we decided to make the pilgrimage to Utah this Christmas season. But nobody wants to travel with presents. So we left on Christmas afternoon. 

Christmas felt really hectic to me this year. I'm not sure why. I tried to be on the ball, getting presents ready before December. But doing so didn't lessen my stress. So on Christmas Day I sat in the airport, finally done with getting everything prepped and making everything magical, and I felt a little bit like a zombie. We waited at our terminal for about forty-five minutes, and I just stared into space for that whole time. My frazzled nerve endings needed to recover. Later in the week, my college-aged nephew said, "Christmas is finals week for moms." So true! I think I was caught up a little in the thick of thin things. It wasn't my favorite Christmas Eve/Day ever. But live and learn. 

Our friends the Lundgrens were sick, so we weren't able to do our Christmas Eve celebration with them:(But we still exchanged food! Christmas isn't Christmas anymore without Swedish meatball in addition to rice pudding.

In Utah we had a whirlwind of family activities. We spent one day with the Dennis family then the next day with the McCombs family, and so on. We had a family dinner with both, sat in a hot tub on top of a frigid mountain, went to church in Felicia's ward to hear her speak and had dinner at her house after, puttered one day at the Dennis house, watched the BYU bowl game, learned how to juggle (kids did anyway--thanks, Alan!), walked to DI, had lunch at the fancy SLC Harmon's, saw my parents work, met a senior missionary from Taiwan, went to a movie, went to the temple, and talked all about RS things with Aaron's mom who got set apart that weekend as president in her ward. 

And...these pictures are in reverse order. (And my camera doesn't take good pictures anymore. Something is wrong with the focus.) 

My parents' church building, right next door to the fancy Harmon's.

Brain-dead mama! Good thing I bought myself a Shiatsu neck massager for Christmas!

It was really nice to be with family over the holidays. We get a little lonely down here in Texas. It's a blessing to have such amazing family members to visit. And it's a good thing it was fast Sunday this week so our bodies could recover from the endless stream of sugar and fat that we shoved into them all week long. Yum.