It's always a balance when you live far away from extended family to plan travel. On the one-hand since you live far away you want to travel to see your loved ones, and it's nice if they come to visit you. There aren't that many opportunities in the year for Mason to get extended time away from work, which is usually necessary when traveling anywhere, because we want to make our travel efforts worth the time and energy it takes to get anywhere. It's also hard to make arrangements because sometimes we want to go places that aren't "home" and those guilty feelings creep in quickly. Fortunately we were able to spend early 2015 home in Illinois/Tennessee for a visit to family and we were able to take a family trip to Canada over the summer. We finished off the year with a visit to Evanston and it was so great.
We've got our travel routine from Minot to Evanston down pretty solid. We travel from here to Minneapolis, stay at the same Embassy Suites every time and then Minneapolis to Evanston. We stay at my parents house and it all works. But it's hard. It's also that little reminder of what non-military life is like. Family dinners, going to birthday parties, getting to know our nephews! Spending time with Aunts, Uncles, Grandparents. It's all awesome! But at the same time, it makes us realize that we do love things about our military life too. We get to see awesome parts of the world, we have awesome adventures, and did I mention Mason gets to fly planes?!!!
Anyways, we had a great time visiting family, seeing high school friends, taking an overnight adult trip (thanks mom and dad), have holidays with family and relax. It was a great trip with so many highlights. The boys loved having so much attention.
Christmas was excellent, and it was definitely fun to share the joy of our kids enjoying the holiday with our family. Woodrow got some costumes and assumed full character once he put on the costume. Theo was a bit overwhelmed by all the attention being on him. He even cried on Christmas Eve opening presents with Mason's family. When we asked him what was wrong, he said, "But Dad doesn't want us to have more things." HA! The minimalist has been seeping into our children's minds.
It was a great time. Our drive back to Minneapolis was going so well and we ended up there early and so we took the kids to the Mall of America Waterpark. It was pretty awesome! Theo was upset when we first got there, but warmed up and had a blast! Woodrow loved it. I'm so glad both of our kids are water babies! As soon as we pulled into the parking lot of the hotel after our fun adventure, the stomach flu hit Woodrow. Without too many details we'll just say from Saturday evening until Wednesday was a pretty rough time for the family. Lots of illness. Basically making us not want to go on another road trip the rest of 2016...but I think we've recovered by now.
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