20 Days

That's right.  We were gone from Dec. 9th to the 29th. We spent the first 14 days in Arizona with my family and then back to Colorado for another week.  It was full of ups and downs as most trips are, but overall was a lovely time with family and friends. (we forgot our camera ,duh, so a special thank you to Grandma Corinne and Aunt Courtney for the pic's!)

Arizona

So we drove to AZ in two days, staying at a La Quinta in Gallup, NM (where we slept heavenly--very nice beds). We made traditional stops at Dairy Queen in Raton and Dion's Pizza in Albuquerque.  Yum.  Ellie was pretty good, no really long bouts of crying.  We arrived in AZ on a Sunday and stayed with my sister Courtney and her family.  Of course it rained for the first 2 1/2 days straight (which I consider us lucky to have seen), so we weren't able to do outdoorsy things like tennis for a couple days.  We had great dinners each night with my parents over, which was really great to see them so often.  I also got to see my cousins a couple times and that is always fun.  We had a fun girls day at Leila's and watched The Help. Good movie.  All the guys took off on a great desert mountain biking trip for manly bonding :) We also had an Appetizer Night at Phil and Leila's.  I think it is becoming a tradition because we all like it so much.  So good to eat so many yummy little things!

Santa's Helper!

She just loved this hat!

And then we all got sick....  Ellie first, Michael second, and me not so much till Denver.  It was awful because Courtney's kids were really sick, and Ellie had never been sick until then.  Let's just say she was up almost all night with a fever, and tylenol made her crazy hyper!  I have never seen her like that.  She was just really energetic and constantly babbling for about 2 hours after she took the medicine.  It was sort of cute but freaky at the same time!  So it pretty much grounded us for a good 4 days at least.  Oh well.  I barely was able to squeeze in a visit to my friend Samantha's just before we left for Denver.  Oh and we got family pict's taken by my cousin Kristin that night before we left as well. We packed it in.

Ellie with handsome cousin Brett in their snowflake pj's.

Cousin Grant has about 50 little rubber duckies.  It was so fun to see her play with them.

 Colorado
Well, we left AZ and drove straight for Denver, trying for all in one day.  Michael drove most of the way.  We hit a big storm starting in Pueblo that continued to get worse the closer we got to Denver.  It was so snow packed you couldn't even see tire track lanes in the snow.  You just had to make it all up and work off of the reflectors and other cars in front.  It was wild and slow but eventually after 17 hours in the car we made it to Michael's parent's house.  Ellie was freaking out the last three hours thinking "why am I still in this car seat!" and crying pretty good.
All of Michael's siblings and their spouses were there, minus Matt who's on a mission in Mexico.  They all got to talk to Matt on Christmas so that was fun.  Ellie was super cute opening up her presents.  I didn't have to help too much as she loves paper!  Grandma Kathy got her one of those little tykes piano's--so as she was unwrapping it she kept hitting the keys which made her super curious and want to get at it some more.  She loves playing it, and I love to watch her play it!  All the boys got nerf guns and the wives got ammo.  Nicely played Santa :)  We all went to see the movie "We Bought A Zoo" and that was sooooo good.  Great actors and great story!  The little girl in it was sooo adorable.
And then we finally made it home after 20 days of fun and family!  It was good to get back to routine :)  Ellie loved being home too.  It was the first time I noticed a difference in her like that.  She loved seeing all her toys and familiar things.  Amazing.

Oh the wonder of toes!