Back to Reality

I hate it when Christmas is over. Such a bummer. Why can't it last longer? Every year I come up with these grandiose plans of what our Christmas break will look like (what we'll do, what we WON'T do, etc.) and every year I end up feeling disappointed that it wasn't exactly what I thought it would be. Welcome to LIFE, huh? Anyone else have this problem? January 2nd rolls around and I always wish I had two more weeks.

But I don't. And normal life returns tomorrow whether or not I want it to. So I'm going to do my best to wake up tomorrow with a positive attitude and dive in!

We had a great - but interesting - Christmas. Many pictures to share but I didn't have it in me to download, edit and upload the 100 pictures I have sitting on my camera. I'll definitely post them later. We had a wonderful Christmas Eve with just the 4 of us - started with going out for lunch and then delivering gifts to friends. Then headed to church and had a yummy meal at home - I'd put some effort into it and the kids actually devoured it - what better present for a mom is there? :) The kids got to open one gift and then headed to bed.

Then our night took a downturn.

About 9:30 Murphy started vomiting, and in the first pile we noticed a big long spaghetti noodle.

Which was moving.

Which unfortunately also means it wasn't a spaghetti noodle.

After an emergency call to our vet we learned he had a case of roundworms - which also, as it turns out, is in fact transmittable to humans. This little tidbit of info put me over the edge. I spent the next hour of my Christmas Eve on the internet, reading about roundworms and trying to assess if my children had already been infected. *I'm a bit of a germaphobe.* I also have the small problem of my mind going places to which there is a point of no return.

Meanwhile, Mark loaded Murphy up in the car and drove him to the vet hospital, who were kind enough to take him because we couldn't have him around my mom and dad's dog the next day, or my baby nephew for that matter.

We fell into bed at 12:30 a.m. We did then have a nice Christmas morning, watching a blizzard start building outside. By noon, Mark issued orders that we needed to leave NOW if we were going to make it to Spearfish to my mom and dad's. We threw some things together - forgot more than we remembered - and headed on down the blizzard covered interstate. After a treacherous drive, we made it - just before they closed the interstate.

We had a very nice Christmas there with my parents and my sister and her family. All the while we watched it snow. And snow. And snow. We woke up Saturday morning to it still snowing (serious amounts) and it didn't stop until 3 feet later, late Sat. night. It was AMAZING. We ended up staying an unplanned night, but had fun eating, chatting, playing games and the kids had a BLAST out in the snow.

Meanwhile, Murphy was being treated for his condition and it actually was probably better he was at the vet for the weekend - the snow was so high we would have lost him.

We spent the next week putting Christmas away and getting the house ready for New Year's Eve, when we hosted our dear friends and their two dogs - one of which was a 7 week old Shih-tzu puppy. We had a great evening of watching dogs play. So entertaining!

So all in all, the past two weeks weren't what I had planned (I had visions of laying on the couch, reading a book, watching movies with the kids), but were fun nonetheless.

Life is what happens when you are busy making other plans. :)