On Monday December 17th, we jumped on an airplane and flew to Austin Texas to visit Grandma Terri and Aunt Tasha.  We spent ten days with them and were spoiled rotten the whole time.  We met Tasha's boyfriend (and several other ballerina friends),  played at the park, ate a lot of good food, watched The Nutcracker, had many good conversations, and even visited a singles ward.  (It was the only ward that we could find online that held their services before 2:00 PM.  The only person who talked to us smiled, and asked us if we were aware that it was a singles ward.  Maybe it was crazy of us to show up and disrupt the sacrament with our noisy children, but the speakers did a great job and the service helped prepare us for our Christmas Eve devotional.)

For Christmas the boys wrote letters to Santa and left cookies and milk.

And Santa really spoiled them this year.  I'm pretty sure we will never be able to top the amount of presents Santa brought this year.  He even left a couple toys in Moscow for them to find when we got home.  (Santa knew the XBOX and Skylanders game were too fragile to take on the airplane!)

We also spent a few hours at a jumping park.  The boys had a great time on the trampolines and in the foam pit.

Landon is 8 now so he got to jump on the bigger trampolines with his dad, but since I was with the younger boys I didn't get pictures of that.  Sorry!

After a while of jumping Seth got tired and so we took him home for his nap.

It was a good trip for me too.  I spent most of the time sleeping in Terri's luxurious bed. (one of the primary reasons being, I was drugged up on Benadryl for my allergies )  Chris was able to go on some long walks to help him relax in between working on his immigration case that is going to trial at the end of January.

We left Austin late on the evening of the 28th and after some delays with airplanes we arrived in Spokane at midnight, picked up our bags and the car and finally made it to our beds by 3:00 AM.  Needless to say Saturday was a day of rest and recovery.  The boys were troopers.

One more story of note:  We were driving home from Church on Sunday and Sam asked if he had school the next day.  I told him "No you don't have school for another week."  Landon pipes in with a long and loud "LAAAMMME!!"   So aparently Landon is ready to jump right back into school, and we are raising a huge geek.   I LOVE MY BOYS!