Christmas & Such

I decided since I've been MIA in the blogging world lately, now is just as good a time as any to start up again. Emily is potty training. She's doing really well and we had 3 whole days without a single accident. Her fourth day was accident free except for being wet when she woke from her nap. Then we went out of town and that put a little wrench in progress but she still did well. Had a few accidents but part of that was our fault for not having her sit. Matthew still enjoys preschool although he usually says every Monday night & Wednesday night he doesn't want to go and sometimes again in the mornings when he's being woken up early to get ready. Once he's there he's fine. He's like his dad and takes forever to wake up and it is best to let him wake on his own, but he doesn't get up early enough on his own. It is something I dread because it is a constant battle, I don't want to think about what it'll be like having to do this every morning.


This past weekend we were supposed to have our family Christmas with my side at my brother's in Sartell. We knew a storm was on the way so Brian took Friday off so we could get there before the storm hit. We would have gone on Friday anyways to maximize our time with family but Brian would not have taken the whole day off. The storm hadn't started by the time we went to bed Friday night but it paid us a visit during the night. Saturday was actually not that bad. It ended up that we were the only ones to make it. It is interesting that we are the only ones with kids that had to travel, Brian had to take work off and our area got hit the worst but we were the only ones there. Our Christmas 2 years ago had worse weather and it is the only time every single person was in attendance. When we woke up Sunday morning I checked MnDot's site and saw no travel was advised for our area. We kept an eye on it and decided it was best to stay another night. If we had tried to make it home and hit really bad roads, we would have had to turn all the way around or stay in a motel, neither of which sounded fun. Having already been through this scenario before and not making it home, we didn't want a repeat. Brian had to take Monday off and we had good roads most of the way. There were areas we knew would not have been good had we come home Sunday since they weren't the best by the time we were on them Monday afternoon. When we got home we couldn't get in our side of the alley and it was interesting getting through the other side. We had asked a friend to blow out our parking area and when we got home we had a path to our house, the front steps were cleared out and the sidewalk was done. Not sure who all did that since our neighbor told us he'd take care of the sidewalk but regardless, it was GREAT to not have to spend time shoveling just to get everyone out of the car (we've had to do that before, too).

The kids had a great time playing with their cousins. We had a nice visit and good time playing games. This is what Christmas is about, spending time with family. Exactly the reason we went on Friday. If we're going to say spending time together is important than you better believe we will do everything we can to get there. One of the reasons Brian saves his PTO, which allows him to miss work and still get paid.