Tuesday, January 04, 2011

Back home from holiday in TN

We are back home in Florida from our holiday trip to TN. I have hundreds of photos to sort through and tweak but here is a small sampling.

Kylie preparing cookies and milk for Santa and broccoli and water for the reindeer. Santa left Kylie a note thanking her for both.
122310_001.jpg

We had our Christmas on Christmas Eve. I was pretty sure I heard Kylie rattling around with her presents around 5:00am but she let us sleep until 6:30. Then it was time to see what Santa had brought.
122410_001.jpg

122410_002.jpg
Kylie was very thorough and methodical in opening her presents. For example, we got her a set of alphabet stamps. She wanted to stamp her name, and our names before opening any more presents. She got a musical jewelry box and she left the living room to find the perfect place for it in her bedroom. She got five scented lip balms and she again left the tree and all of her presents to go line up the lip balms just so on her nightstand. You get the picture. Karen and I were cracking up. We joked that we would have torn through the few presents Kylie had in about five minutes. But with Kylie, opening presents lasted over an hour. It was lovely. With lots of her exclamations of "I really wanted that from Santa!"

Friday afternoon we drove halfway to TN and Kylie got to sleep on a pull-out sofa of our hotel's living room suite. Kylie went right to sleep--to my very great relief!
122510_003.jpg

On Saturday, we finished the journey to TN and had Christmas with Karen's family. It was incredible for Karen's Mom and Dad to have all of their children and grandchildren gathered together at the same time.
122510_006.jpg

122510_005.jpg

122510_004.jpg

122510_007.jpg

Kylie had really hoped for a white Christmas. She got her wish! These are Kylie's cousins which Kylie has nick-named her "girly girls". They played with Kylie constantly. I wanted to bundle all of her cousins up and take them home with me to Florida because they were so patient with Kylie--letting her boss them around and such.
122610_008.jpg

Then there was a fantastic Christmas with my Mom
122810_009.jpg

and Dad.
123010_010.jpg

There was a fun trip to the mall and Build-a-Bear compliments of Karen's brother Ted.
123110_011.jpg

And finally more driving and staying in hotels.
010111_012.jpg

It was a really wonderful trip. And I very glad to be home!

Now, back to sorting through those photos.

2 comments:

Michaela said...

Oh, how great that you are back. The trip sounds wonderful and I can't wait to see more pictures. :-)

Louise said...

Looks like you had a fabulous holiday. It always just feels so good and so right to spend it with family!