White Christmas - Just What We Wanted!

I guess you get what you ask for. We wanted a white Christmas and we sure got it! We went from warm, sunny Southern Texas to cold, cold, snowy, snowy Kansas! Check out the difference...amazing! (thanks for playing in the snow with Annabelle Sitti!)

Santa Brought Daddy A Box of ROCKS!

Yes, when you are naughty Santa DOES deliver a box of rocks. (Look at Annabelle's expression!)

More pics from Christmas

Yes, it was a good Christmas at Sitti & Papa's!

After spending Christmas at Sitti & Papa's we headed out to the "big city" of Roxbury, KS to visit Great Grandma Writer & the rest of the Writer family. We were back on the road again (thanks for letting us use your car Papa!). We were so glad to get to see the Writer family again (I didn't take any pics to post, sorry!) It was so good to see our families again (although it did involve a lot of traveling time!)

Sitti & Papa's House

Christmas at Sitti & Papa's was great (as usual). Lots of good (Lebanese) food, fun & white, fluffy snow (& tons of it!). Annabelle got to play with Rylan (he is such a cutie! Even during the "poop incident of 2009") & her other cousins came on Christmas day to play. It was so good to see everyone again. Annabelle was thrilled that Aunt Lisa bought her a new digital camera, I think a new blog with Annabelle's photos might be coming soon :)

Pics of the Flight

Here we are on the first flight. Annabelle was totally AMAZED that we were IN the clouds. I was sitting next to her with my eyes closed - she kept saying "Mama, are you sleeping?"

...and the Journey Begins

We headed out to Kansas on Wednesday, we had to first drive to Harlingen, TX to the airport, tickets were much cheaper flying Southwest out of Harlingen so we decided the 45 minute drive would be worth it to save some money. Soooo... we drove from McAllen to Harlingen, flew from Harlingen to Houston & Houston to Tulsa, Sitti & Lisa picked us up at the Tulsa airport and drove us the two hours to Chanute. Needless to say, by the time I got in the car at Tulsa I had a raging headache and was ready to end the traveling extravaganza. I'm not much of a fan of flying and would much rather pull out each fingernail one by one than get on a plane but I decided to overcome my weird motion/travel/paranoia sickness - all to spend Christmas with family (heeheee!).

And...here's the weird thing...Annabelle TOTALLY LOVES flying (freak I say!). She was not scared one bit. When we had a very rough landing in Harlingen she was screaming WWWWEEEEEE! Like it was some kind of fun roller coaster ride. I'm not really sure where she got this weird love of flying - must be from her Daddy, definitely not from me. I spend my time on the plane with my eyes clamped shut waiting for the plane to land so I can stop my head from spinning (thanks for passing on the motion sickness Mom, love you!).

Our First Christmas in the Valley

All in all our our first Christmas in the Valley was a total success. Santa was able to find our house & delivered lots of gifts (Daddy would say a few too many) for Annabelle. The weather was unusually warm (for us) and we had a very good Christmas. Annabelle's swimmer puppy arrived (thank you Santa) and she got a new scooter that we were able to try out in the driveway right after she opened it (something that would never happen in KS or OK! since there always seemed to be snow and freezing cold weather at Christmastime). We opened gifts here and then headed out to the airport the next day for our journey to Kansas to spend Christmas with family.