The day after Christmas it warmed up to a nice 20 degrees, so we decided to make a break for it and visit the snow. It was just like in the movie the Christmas Story. We bundled her all up to the point she could barely move her arms. Luckily Auntie Marlene built the snowman in advance, so all we had to do was plop her down and get the shot of Kaelyn's first visit to the snow! Much to our surprise, she actually got quite a kick out of the freezing cold, blustery wind blowing her face numb. Of course, maybe the smile was actually frozen onto her face? She never did move - she just stood there smiling, politely pleasing the photographers!
Then we were on to the rest of the annual (25th, I might add) sister cookie bake. She did real well and even did a little mixing of her own. She never even pulled a plate of cookies down!
The rest of the week we visited several other friends and family. We visited mommy's friends Tracia and Ryan and their three boys (who are all grown up now) - Reed, Riley, and Dakota. Riley was born the year we got married - I can't believe how big he is!! It was so great to see them again, it's been too long.
We got to see our birth month cousin - Camden - who was born just a week before Kaelyn - with Kathy's cousin Cheryl (among several other family members who we didn't get in photos...bummer.
And the yearly visit with mommy's friends that she met while traveling to Europe in high school. Shelley's three kids didn't make it into the photo, and Erica's hubby Brad was pulling double duty at another party, but we did get Bill, Aimee, Shelley, Pat, and Erica all together for a great shot! It was so nice to catch up - although too distracting with Kaelyn to really get a solid story out of anyone. Ah, welcome to parenthood!
Overall, our traveling went really well. Kaelyn was a "lapchild" on our flights since we did not buy her a seat. To date, we had been lucky on every flight to get a third seat at no cost, but not this time. The flight out went fine - we had a great tailwind which decreased our airtime by 1 whole hour. This was fine by us as she had skipped a nap and was nowhere near ready for bed. We kept her busy with toys and eating. She had trouble the first night of each house we stayed at (3 total in two weeks) - she would wake up at 2am (home time) exactly and be up for about 2 hours. We ended up having her sleep in our bed on those nights which we've never done and took a bit for her to get used to! Otherwise, she slept well, ate well, and traveled well on the plane back. Daddy's magic got her to sleep for 2 hours on our return flight. She's been sleeping like a baby since we got back - 13 hour nights and two 2 hour naps during the day. We are so lucky ;-)
