$2.70 in change and other news

I still haven't gotten my new camera batteries (they're in my amazon shopping cart but I still haven't purchased them), so these are some old pics of my beautiful kids in case this blog entry gets boring.

We packed up all the kids and drove all 14 hrs to Sacramento to spend the holidays with my in-laws. The drive went really well and I still haven't given in to the DVD player in the van. We're old school...toys and books for entertainment...and my personal favorite when I was a kid...looking out the window!

We spent Christmas Eve and Day with Jeff's parents and sister's family. The kids and their cousins were so well behaved opening their gifts and playing all day which surprised me considering a full house and chocolate, candy, and cookie overload.

Meanwhile, Jeff fixed our CD player in our van. A couple of years ago Joshua put all of our change that he found in the car and put them in the CD and tape player. So, we went without good music for 2 yrs. Jeff retrieved $2.70 in quarters, dimes, nickles and pennies and ran off to buy a few fun CD's for our drive home. After a week and a half of visiting, playing, shopping and hanging out, we started our super long journey home.

This time however it was more eventful than we would have liked. We started getting closer to Mt Shasta and Jeff & I noticed hundreds of ducks or geese flying south. It wasn't just a few V's of birds, this went on for miles and miles. So we knew we were going to come into some very cold weather and snow. Once we got up to the California border we were dumped on with tons of snow. Jeff exited off the freeway to get chains and in doing so got into a little fender bender. No damage was done to the other guy's truck, but we broke our headlight and put a little ripple in our hood. Thank goodness the other guy shrugged it off. So we bought our overpriced chains and gloves and Jeff got soaked with the snow while putting them on. A few miles later, we took the chains off and cruised for while until we reached the Oregon border. The chains went back on and about 10 miles later, they came back off. By then we became pros at putting on and taking off chains. In Oregon after dinner we decided to go to Toys R Us and let the kids spend their gift cards from Uncle Mike and more importantly run around in the store and burn some energy. Leanna had a loose tooth, her second one, and it was really bothering her. So I checked it, and it basically fell right into my hand. Jeff went and got a wet paper towel and I put the tooth in my purse and we continued shopping.

Back on the road everything went fine until 1:00 am when we were about 2 miles from home and a good ol' policeman caught us doing 65 mi/hr in a ridiculously low 55 mi/hr highway zone. Jeff shrugged it off because we were having such a great conversation and he "didn't want to let it get us down". Could my husband surprise me more?

We made it home, everyone got colds and we are just barely getting better. Maybe next year I'll ask Santa for a leer jet and a personal pilot!