Thanksgiving in Arizona

As I mentioned last week, this year we spent Thanksgiving in AZ with our AZ family.  The time there was nice, the two day drive each way was not.  The kids, my mom, and I left the Friday before Thanksgiving.  We drove to San Francisco on the first day, spent Saturday out of the car in San Fran, and then powered down to Arizona on Sunday. Overall the kids were real troopers.  Every once in a while CC would cry that her "bun hurt" and that she wanted to go home but it could have been much worse.

The week that followed went by in a blur.  The kids stayed up late every night and got up early every morning and we all got very little sleep.  We spent our days cramming as much fun and family time in as we could.  We divided our time between Jeremy's family (who we were staying with), my grandma, aunts, uncle, cousins, Emily, and Kai.  The hardest part of the week was trying to make sure that everyone felt we had spent enough time with them and that meant a lot of long days running around.

One of the main activities that was going down during the week was clearing out my grandma's house to get it ready to go on the market.  I spent a fair amount of time sorting, cleaning, and removing wall paper.  Probably the highlight of this endeavor was going through my grandma's jewelry and the fun pieces I ended up with to remind me of her and this adorable dress CC ended up with.

In addition to that huge project, we went to the park, went to the arcade, went paintball shooting, rode go-carts, played soccer, and kickball and who could forget wrestling.  In full disclosure some of those activities were just the kids and grandpa, but in any case it was a busy week.

On Wednesday (technically Thursday when they landed) Jeremy and my dad flew down.  They were supposed to get in about 1am, but their flight was delayed and they didn't arrive until about 2:30am.  After a few hours of sleep we were up and at it for the Thanksgiving festivities.  We had three houses to at least make an appearance at, with our main dinner with Grandpa and Lollie and the Bunker side of the family.  The day was wonderful, with the exception of the "turkey not being cooked" debacle, but we won't talk about that.

On Saturday we started our trek back, now with my dad and Jeremy in tow.  Unfortunately they drive back was not as smooth as the drive down.  The traffic was terrible and over the course of the two days it added about 4 hours to our travel time.  By the time we made it home we were all ready to be out of the car (understatement of the century).

All in all it was a fun week.  I just hope, wish, pray that they next time we go to AZ we get to fly.