Relative Vacation

Vacation is still alive and well, even though we're back in West Virginia. Doug doesn't start classes until Monday morning so we continue to party hardy. What does partying hardy mean to us?

Apparently, it means doing laundry and dishes, taking out the trash, organizing our drawers and closet, our bins, Isaac's drawers and closet, taking down Christmas decorations, getting a West Virginia licence and vehicle registration, WV plates, a new birth certificate for Doug, sending out various applications, washing the truck, grocery shopping, and updating, balancing, and blowing our budget. Isaac has been helpful throughout this whole process.

We've also gone to the pool together, watched movies while Isaac slept, gone out to eat, shopped for clothes (thanks to our Christmas returns), and we've gotten to hang out a ton together. We've got fewer relatives around, but we've got each other, so it's still a vacation. (Literary side note: I just finished Wuthering Heights and I'm kind of stunned that Emily Bronte could devote so much time to fleshing out such a diabolical Heathcliff. Wow!)

Some of my pictures from vacation are missing (my sister-in-law borrowed them in a way that somehow sucked them off our camera's memory...) but here are some highlights:

1) Doug and Troy, my brother, had a contest to see who could make the best gingerbread house. In theory, they were serving my mom by contributing to the Christmas atmosphere in our home a few hours before we had an enormous Sheide party there (instead of cleaning bathrooms, cooking, and scrubbing, like the rest of us--thank you, boys). In reality, they contested bitterly. No one else in the family would dare compete with Troy artistically, but Doug was brave. He sent Tanner outside with a hammer to crush candy canes (it made for a shinier, more magical sheet of snow on the ground); Doug dissected and chewed little jellybean bits to make the scarf for his snowman; I can't remember the specific sweet entrails that formed the three sections of his snowman, but they took at least 20 minutes to form before they were ready for their frosting coating. Doug sent Breezy, my sister-in-law, back into a grocery store in the middle of a snow storm so she could buy the exact breath mints he had just run out of for his roof. At the end of the battle, here are the results. For the sake of my filial obligations, I will not say which gingerbread house I prefer.

Doug's house:

Troy's house:

2) Isaac met Santa on Christmas Eve at the Sheide house. I didn't want to pay for him to meet Santa earlier, knowing Santa comes to the Sheide Christmas Eve bash without fail, so here they met. It wasn't exactly love at first sight, but I'm sure the relationship will strengthen over time:

3)Christmas Day: Isaac met another new and truly wonderful friend, his rocking horse. After they met each other, Isaac was reluctant to mount his horse again--he was happy (and brave) enough to pet his new friend. Unfortunately, the horse didn't fit in our luggage, so he is staying at the Sheide home, awaiting his master in the near distant future. River and Haven have been looking after him for Isaac since we left Utah.

4) On December 27th, we left for sunny Sun City, Arizona to be with more of Doug's family. We had a lovely time, even though we can't prove it with pictures. Sure, some have been zapped from my camera's memory, but I also renounced technology during most of my Christmas vacation, and I'm only sorry about it because I didn't coordinate with my friends in the area so we could play together, and I was late finding out that one of my wonderful friends from college had a little baby girl. So here's my last picture from my wonderful vacation:

Yep, me at Wicked, thanks to my awesome husband, who took this picture of me in front of our theatre in Hollywood, California. I didn't all-out cry during the show, but I misted up a few times, particularly as Elphaba sang her first song--I was so genuinely happy to be there with the man I love most in the world.

So that's it for now. We're back, we're happy, we're busy, so back to my vacation (wherein both Doug and Isaac are sleeping...:))!