Back to Reality

The kids and I arrived home after spending Thanksgiving weekend with my family in sunny AZ. We had such a great time! The kids were perfect on the plane. On the way out we upgraded to first class baby! That was great, I tell you what. Cole was such a little man. He sat across the aisle from Abbey and I and chatted most of the way with the old lady sitting next to him. He ate all of his breakfast, Abbey ate all of my fruit. Then I turned on movies for each of them - Cole had my laptop and Abbey had the portable DVD player. Peace the rest of the flight. I started a new book - it's pretty good - and we had a smooth flight and landing.

Dad picked us up from the airport and we headed up to Zac's dad's house in Tonto Basin for dinner. We had a great time with Zac's dad and his family. This was their first holiday without their Mom, so I'm sure that was pretty hard. Ted got choked up during the prayer, and that was pretty sad. But all in all, it was a good day and a happy day.

Laurie, Mom and I woke before the crack of dawn and hit up Starbucks and then Wal Mart for Black Friday. We had a great time! What a trip that was. I got the kids loads of toys and then wondered how on earth I was going to get all of this crap home. Mom ended up buying over half the toys from me to give the kids for Christmas, so I ended up borrowing an empty suitcase from Dad and stuffing all the toys in there. Easy peasy! Mom and Dad went to meet up with friends, so Laurie and I took the kids shopping at a great outdoor mall and ate sushi for lunch at Kona Grill. So yummy! We had wine with lunch, the kids ate pizza, and a good time was had by all. We shopped around a bit more and headed back to the house so that the babies could nap.

That night we left the kids at home and went out for drinks with Laurie, Zac, Shawn, Nikki and their friends. I felt like the loser divorced friend without Scott being there. I was surrounded by couples!! But it was fun to watch everyone have too much to drink and be silly. We didn't get home until almost 2, so with accounting for the fact that I had been up since 4:15, that was almost a full 24 hours being awake! Yikes.

Saturday was a mellow day. We ended up taking the kids to a really nice park near Laurie's house that afternoon. Saturday evening we went out to the Phoenix Zoo for Zoo Lights. It was great. We all got bundled up, got coffee and hot chocolate and walked around to look at all of the lights. Then it was back to Laurie's for take out from Pei Wei. Yummy!!

Sunday morning at the crack of dawn we were back up and headed to the airport. A quick trip, but I wouldn't have missed it for the world.

For the record - Nikki's boyfriend, Shawn, is adorable. I hadn't really had a chance to talk to him much before ( I had only met him briefly once before), and he's such a nice guy. He seems to worship the ground Nikki walks on - and I'm pretty sure that feeling is mutual for her, too.

Here's some photos from the trip...