Arizona and Christmas 2013

Every year about this time I realize that I am way behind on the blog, and I have to hustle to get caught up to the new year.  This year is no different so, with that said, let's recap Christmas and our Arizona vacation.

Our trip to Arizona started out a little rough with a late night flight that got delayed and turned into more or less an overnight flight.  We finally make it at 4am and had to spend the majority of the next day recuperating.  The rest of the week leading up to Christmas, and really the whole trip for that matter was a bit of a blur.

We spent most of our time with family.  Jeremy's brother, Jensen, surprised his parents and flew in for a few days and it was really nice to see him, we spent Christmas Eve with Jeremy's extended family on his dad's side, and got to facetime with Garret on Christmas.  We were also able to see some of my family.  We facetimed with my parents and saw my grandma, aunt and uncle, some of my cousins, and of course Emily and Kai.

Kai and Merrick were best buddies as usual and wanted to spend as much time together as possible.  We went to see the Temple lights together, went "lunar golfing", and just let them play.  They always miss each other when they are apart so it was good they were able to spend some time together.

Over the course of the trip we had lots of fun.  We saw a few friends.  We had plans to see a few more, but the end of our trip went a little sideways, but I will get to that in a minute.  We also got to visit Santa and take Merrick to "ride the horses" at the mall.  They weren't exactly horses, but motorized creatures that you ride through the mall.  Jeff had been talking for weeks about taking Merrick to ride them.  Merrick had a blast, but I don't know if he had more fun or if Jeff had more fun watching him.

Christmas itself was fairly low key.  We all slept in a bit, then got up for presents.  Carolyn's parents came over for presents and breakfast and it was nice to get to see them as they are part of what went sideways.  Most of the rest of the day we spent relaxing and playing with our new toys (Jeremy and I finally made our entrance into the world of smart phones).  We capped the day off with a super yummy Mexican dinner.  Probably my favorite part of Christmas actually came the night before when Merrick wrote his note to Santa and then prayed for him on his "big trip" (please disregard my chicken scratch in the note.  I was frantically trying to transcribe his dictation.)

While the trip as a whole was really nice, the end got a bit bumpy.  First Grammy (Carolyn's mom) was rushed to the ER.  She was in tremendous pain and it turns out her gallbladder had ruptured and gangrene had set in.  She had emergency surgery to remove her gallbladder and has since had some complications.  She is still in the hospital almost a week and a half later.  Then Carrigan got sick.  She developed a fever that did not want to respond to Tylenol and climbed over two days to 102.  Eventually her fever broke and she returned to her normal happy self.  We had almost a full day reprieve before Merrick announced at dinner that he "was cold".  Before we knew it his fever was climbing.  Our last day in AZ he spent down and out with a fever of over 103.

While all the sickness caused us to miss out on some fun and getting to see some friends, eventually the fevers did dissipate and thankfully everyone was feeling better when we headed home.