Tuesday, February 3, 2015

A Child's Christmas in Arkansas, Part I

We made the pilgrimage home to Fayetteville for Christmas this year.  The travelling went very well, thankfully.  The only mishap involved Chandler drinking numerous bottles of water on the airplane and the obvious result, which Mom didn't quite factor in.  Not a terrible travel problem, in the grand scheme of things.

First, we stayed with Mark's parents, Grandma and Grandpa.  (They live in Fayetteville now.  Yay!)  Smarty Grandma got the girls a gingerbread house kit, which was very nice to have on a drizzly afternoon.


We didn't manage to get a photo of the girls playing with pop guns on one of our two trips to Cabella's.  Frances grasped hers and said, "What do you want to kill?"  Highlight of this parenting gig so far, let me tell you.

Christmas Eve we shifted over to my parents' to see the aunts, uncles and cousins.  It was a lot of humanity.  We made it through the Christmas Eve service at St. Paul's by the skin of our teeth.  A woman in the pew behind us told us we weren't at all bothersome.  She was lying.

Christmas morning was loosely controlled chaos, of course.  The Littlest Person really wasn't interested in opening presents, bless her.  What she really wanted to do was watch  Sir's sheep out the window.


 (Shhh: We're recycling some of her unopened gifts on her birthday and next Christmas.)

Dinner was a tad disorganized, really.  Mom/Mimi did almost all the heavy lifting for this meal.  Jocelyn was ill (that's her wrapped in the red blanket) and Lindsay and I have no excuse.  We got all the kids seated seconds before the meal was to begin.  They got their picture taken, took one look at the food and asked for hot dogs.

This is Frances saying, "Where's my hot dog?"


No one had the energy to convince them they actually wanted to eat the food that was already prepared.  Hot dogs were served and inhaled; then, they moved on to the cinematic portion of the evening before the adults got anywhere near their dinners.  Not quite the envisioned meal, but like the airplane mishap, probably foreseeable and not all that terrible.

Moving on...

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