Christmas lights

This last weekend we went to see my older brother in DC. He and his lovely wife, K, have eight kids. We hadn't even met two of them, so we were excited to go see them. The plan was to leave as soon as B got off work on Friday. It's a six hour drive so we didn't want to leave too late. Of course Friday was the one day of the week that B didn't get done early at work. Not only did he not get done early, he was an hour late! Why is life like that? I don't have an answer. All I can say is that it's so annoying. We didn't leave our house until 4:30. We were able to make good time and got to their house at 11:00.

Of course little B slept almost the whole way there. When we put him in the car he found the strap on the bag and latched onto it. Please don't judge us because he's already forward facing and he's not two. The angle of our seats is really annoying and when we had it put in rear facing we had to take it to the fire department to have the fire fighters put it in. I took it out one day when I was riding in my friend's car. I couldn't figure out how to put it in backwards, so forward facing he went. Now he's been forward facing long enough that I fear if we turned him around he would lash out irrationally. And we all know there's no rational talking when a 21 month old is lashing out!

We called to tell them that we had left late and were told that two of their kids were sick. We were already packed, in the car and eating the Little Caesars we had just gotten for dinner. Can we talk about that for a minute? I love that they have pizza for five bucks! I had made the awful mistake of going to get snacks for the drive when I was hungry. Needless to say, we had enough chocolate, licorice and crackers to last, well, a long time. So we were able to get one pizza for five bucks and it fed us dinner. We just topped ourselves off with the junk we had! If that's not living the dream I don't know what is! Anyway, since we were already en route, we decided to take our chances and go mingle with sick children. Unbeknownst to us, as we drove their kids started falling sick like snow in a blizzard, fast and a lot of them! We felt so bad for the littles that were feeling under the weather. Six of their eight kids were six by Saturday afternoon.

Poor A wanted to play, but he couldn't be too far away from his bucket. I heard my brother say more than once to more than one of their sicko's, "Always have your bucket with you!" 

This was taken before M, (The M on the right,) got whatever was in the air. These two played together all morning, but then she said that her stomach was starting to hurt, she was out for the rest of the day.

V got sick in waves. She would be fine for a little while and then she wouldn't be. When she felt good, these two played a lot. She had cars! K didn't care that they were pink and purple, he just loved that she would play cars with him! We just hung out on Saturday. And by hanging out I mean that we cleaned up throw up, disinfected surfaces and tried to make sure that little B didn't play in whatever fluid he found. My brother and his wife are an amazing team and they cleaned up bodily fluid like machines! B and I felt so helpless. We tried to help, but sick kids don't want an uncle or aunt, they want their parents. Even though kids were sick, it was good to visit. Our niece, S, asked for funny stories about her dad. I told her about the time her dad was coming home from school, and ran over a duck, but not with the tires. He looked in his rear view mirror and saw the stunned duck standing there. He put his car in reverse, ran over the duck again, stopped, leaned out of his car, grabbed the duck and brought it home. When he walked in the house the duck's body was in his backpack with the zipper zipped up to it's neck. He walked into the bathroom, filled the tub with water and put the duck in. It swam around the bathtub so happily; simply because it didn't know it's fate. If it had known that it was going to become dinner, it would have tried to bust out of there. Instead it swam it's last laps in the bathtub of the only bathroom in the house. When I got done telling the story, he tried to deny it. Thankfully my parents had come for the weekend and my mom was able to vouch for me. He then told the story of when he hit a deer on the way home from church. He looked in his mirror and noticed it wasn't dead. He told K they had to go back. They turned around and he got out. He picked the deer up and walked to their car. At the time they didn't have their 12 passenger van that they have now. No, they had a Toyota Echo. In my opinion that car is basically a roller skate. It's tiny. He made it back to the car and told K that she needed to drive. She moved over, he got in the passenger side while holding the deer. He said he was holding it like you do a baby when the baby needs to burp. The deer's head was on his shoulder and he was patting the deer's back. All the sudden, the deer opens it's eyes and starts freaking out! Deer legs, fur and body are going everywhere. A is telling K to stop the car! She stops, he opens the door and the deer bounds out and across the street. As I listened to him tell the story, I was laughing so hard! Why oh why would you pick up a deer and put it on your lap in the car? Good times! He's really funny and should write a book!

Sunday after church we went to see the lights on the temple grounds at the DC temple. We were so excited to see them! I had heard they are beautiful, and they are. Our camera isn't the best and so most of these are blurry, but we tried!

That truly is incredible! The spirit of the temple is one of the greatest feelings on earth!

We were checking to see if taking pictures with the flash on worked very good. It did unless you want to see the lights behind you. He's a cheese ball and loves to say "cheeeeeeese" when he sees the camera.

So we turned the flash off but if the picture taker or the subjects in the picture move, it's blurry. This one worked ok, so we went for the family shot.

We actually got a good one with my dad's Ipad, but I can't figure out how to get it off email and put it on here, so just imagine this one really clear and beautiful!

There was a camel next to the manger scene. Our niece, S, really wanted to take a picture of us on the camel. K loved it and wanted to play on the camel for longer than our freezing body parts would allow.

K also wanted to take a picture of us. He did pretty good, but we wanted to try it without the flash on.

Fireworks at the temple! Not really, this is just what happens when you let a six year old take your picture when the flash is turned off. I think it's actually a pretty cool picture!

We went inside the visitor's center to thaw. How awesome to have the statue of Christ with Christmas tree's behind him! I wish that the flash hadn't gone off so that you could see how beautiful it really was, just use your imagination!

We had a great weekend even though the cousin's were sick. We laughed and talked and ate really good food. We made it home with only one case of pink eye and one case of yucky diapers for a day. It was totally worth it to be able to see/meet family and go see the lights at the temple!