Monday, February 22, 2010

Flashback - Driving home from Oregon

The good news is that, thanks to my brother Daniel, our computer is now up and running again and he managed to salvage most of what was on it. The bad news is that we still lost quite a few pictures. We backed everything we have up, but in light of this, I'm going to start posting old photos so that, should anything like this recur in the future, we'll have at least some documentation of our childrens' childhood! :)
This past Christmas the Mr. had several interviews in Portland, OR the week before Christmas, so we decided to make a trip out of it. His last interview was the 23rd, and we had initially planned on leaving right after the interview in order to make it home by Christmas Eve, but the interview ran late so we ended up leaving Christmas Eve. We try to avoid driving 'straight through' (12 hours in the car is LONG, especially with Wiggles!) so we decided to stay in Boise (courtesy of Mom and Dad Stout - thank you!!!!)

So, we ended up spending Christmas Eve in a hotel (to stretch our little legs and get some sleep!) and driving home Christmas Day. Fortunately our kids are still young enough they didn't realize it, so we just had our own little Christmas Eve on the 25th once we were home, and Christmas morning on the 26th and they were none the wiser. (We felt bad about making all the hotel and gas station workers work on Christmas - we gave everyone little Christmas goodies and hoped they were making some good over time!) It was sort of an adventure trying to stock up on everything we would need for our drive (food, etc) on Christmas Eve - Walmart was the only place open and they ended up closing an hour early so we had less than 2 minutes in the store, meaning we had to literally run in and grab whatever we could find for dinner, breakfast and lunch the next day (not knowing what restaurants would be open on Christmas) - which was no small feat since the shelves were almost completely empty. We sort of felt like contestants on Supermarket Sweep. Both the Mr. and I ended up grabbing caesar salads so we had salad coming out our ears but not much else. The kids aren't huge salad fans but we managed to survive without going hungry, and it was so funny.

The highlight of the trip was, of course, the swimming pool! (our kids love to swim even more than they love to breathe, it seems!) Since it was Christmas we nearly had the hotel to ourselves, and in our hours at the pool we never saw another soul, so it was nice. The funny thing was that I somehow forgot to pack swimming suits. Strange, I know - what was I thinking?! We realized this moments before we left my parent's house in Oregon so we ransacked my mom's 'extra clothing' box and found 2 pairs of boys trunks, a girls top and another girls suit. The girls suit would have fit Angel but we had to do a little rearranging as you can see in the following pictures. We didn't have any swim diapers either (and didn't have time to grab them in our mad dash in Walmart) so with the combination of a water-loaded diaper and a 3-sizes-too-big suit, it was a miracle Wiggles stayed covered! :) I borrowed one of my sister's suits but the poor Mr. had to wear his only pair of shorts (and therefore ended up driving home in wet, wet shorts! :) Overall, this certainly tops the list for one of our most adventurous and hilarious family trips!

Toward the end of the trip, Grins was so tired he fell asleep with a cheesestick in his hand. I thought it was so funny I had to take a picture.

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