Country Vacation - Part 2

On the Thursday after Christmas we were supposed to hurry over to my Uncle Jon's antique store in the morning to help move some heavy furniture to my dad's house...but we decided playing with Lily sounded like much more fun instead.

We discovered right away how much Lily loves to run. And run and run and run. She is going to keep us active, that is for sure!

We eventually made it over to help move the new furniture into my dad's house. It's probably a miracle no one got a hernia.

Dad treated everyone to lunch afterwards at the cafe in town. (T is modeling his new favorite hat.)

After naps and of course more hours of card playing we finally opened Christmas presents with this side of the family. All along I just thought we'd be exchanging a few gifts (mainly for the boys), but it turns out they'd been waiting on us all along to open ALL their presents. We had a fun little post-Christmas celebration.

Grandma showed us she even loves Lily!

Matt looked over at one point in the afternoon and saw Drew sitting like this.

Which immediately reminded us of one of our all-time favorite pics of Drew (from Nov 2010).

Sweet boy!

We had dinner that night at another cafe. My Uncle Jon and Grandma Odena eat there about 5 nights a week since it's only 2 minutes from their front door. It's their home away from home. Abbi and her gang came back over that night and Drew was ecstatic to see Blake again. Those two boys are two peas in a pod.

They loved playing in the toy room at Uncle Jon's house. Although why they tried to move all the toys to the room across the hall is beyond me.

They are both so imaginative and we could hear them upstairs making up all these pretend stories. They especially loved all of the tea sets. Only 2 pieces were broken this year and Uncle Jon couldn't have been any sweeter about it. He'll be lucky to have any sets left by the time these boys are grown. When they caught wind of it being Drew's bedtime they promised they'd just go to sleep on their own.

Of course they didn't, but man that is some cuteness overload or what?!  I hope those two cousins grow up being the best of friends just like me and Abbi did.

While another card tournament was taking place, Adam spent most of the time hiding army men all over the house. We found them in some incredibly random places and I think Uncle Jon is going to be finding army men for a long time to come.

With a fussy Titus and a new puppy, our sleeping was pretty poor on our vacation (read: Worst. Sleep. Ever.) so we decided we should probably head out on Friday and work on getting settled back at home. I was so thankful for this time with my Grandma Odena. She has also had a very hard year health-wise and it was good to spend such good quality time with her and the rest of the family.

I think this was my first time to not cry when saying goodbye to Ozzie. He has settled into his home there so well and between my grandma, uncle, and the nurses that visit every day, he probably gets more attention than ever. He is really happy and dearly loved and I will never be able to thank them enough for taking him in when we could no longer have him at our home.

Before we left for good, the boys went for tractor rides and fed the cows one last time at the farm.

We sure love that ol' Papaw.

The fun wasn't quite over yet though...our last stop before heading home was in nearby Pocahontas to see our lovely Aunt Char at her parents' house.

She even had a present under the tree for our three.

Thank you Grahams for letting us invade your house with all our chaos!

The boys did so good for the first half of our trip home, but the second half was perhaps the worst we've ever experienced.  I'd never been so happy to pull into our garage that night.

So there you have it (for the 5 of you that made it through all of this), our Christmas holiday is finally fully blogged.  I was beginning to think it would never happen!