After Christmas...

We were able to have a few days of fun after Christmas.  Dan and Aranne and their kiddos Blake and Chelsea joined the fun on the 26th and when Nate and Katie would come over we had my entire family all together!  We are a loud and crazy bunch but it was a lot of fun.

We went to a train park in Scottsdale (forget the name!).  We had gone another time but this time they had lights up and could ride the train at night.  It was quite busy and we let the kids play on the huge playground first.  That's when I experienced one of the scariest moments as a parent... I was running around with Abby and following behind her as she was going on the play structure.  There was an enclosed ladder in the middle of the highest platform.  She was waling up to it and I was about to steer her around it so we could go down the slide.  But when she walked up to it instead of just looking down into it she stepped right off!!  She fell about 6 or 7 feet and I thought for sure she had hit her head on the bottom bar.  I literally screamed, raced down to grab her and ran to find Steve.  She was crying of course and I started bawling.  I was so freaked out and thought for sure she would be injured like a concussion or something.  We sat for a long time to get her and me calmed down.  We of course watched her closely and she showed no signs of anything serious besides being upset and tired.  It completely rattled me to see her fall and I can't even tell you the last time I screamed like that (also upsetting: the fact that no one come to help me, just one man looked at me, that's it.) Poor girl took a minor spill on a McDonalds playground later that night so I shared an ice cream with her which seemed to help.  Oh, and on top of that we didn't even ride on the train because the line was crazy long which we didn't expect at all.  Oh well.

The rest of our time there was done doing anything super exciting but still fun and a lot of playtime for the kids... a trip to Kohl's for the moms, a walk for Preston with Daddy and Grandpa, Steve and I seeing Les Mis, a group going to see The Hobbit, movie watching for the kids, and kids playing with Christmas presents.  One of the things we got to do was take new family pictures.  The last ones we took were when Preston was about 20 months old and I wasn't even pregnant with Abby yet.  Since then each of our families have added a baby girl, so we definitely needed new ones. Here's just the preview that the photographer put on facebook. I'm excited to see the rest!

I didn't get as many pictures as I thought I did after Christmas, but my dad is mailing the cd with everyone else's pics, so I might have to add those later.

He crashed while watching a movie. 

Fun at the park with Grandma and Kaia.  The sunshine and beautiful weather was  awesome and  made it even harder to leave.

The time in Arizona went by crazy fast and we were packing up and getting ready to leave before we knew it.  We were the first to leave which was not fun to know we were leaving the fun behind. We were a tired bunch and Abby was getting sick so thankfully the kids slept most of the drive to Las Vegas.

My passed out kids... we really wore them out with all of the fun we had.

Next stop, Pocatello for a late Christmas with Steve's family!