. . A + A + G + J . .: This Christmas Season

Well, this Christmas season was not celebrated in a way we would have ever imagined. I spent the first couple of weeks in December in a wheel chair recovering from my foot surgery, which put a big damper on all of our Christmas season plans from baking and decorating to the tree lighting festival to getting our own tree. It's just not the same when you observe your family doing most of these things instead of doing it with them. We tried really hard to stay upbeat for the boys and had lots of fun Christmas things for them to do (we planned out the 25 days of Christmas for the first time where they picked a "gift" out of a box everyday that contained an activity, like crafts, baking, seeing Christmas lights, decorating their wagon for a spin through the neighborhood, etc). We got a discount on our tree at the tree lot which I am pretty sure was because I was trying to navigate my wheel chair through the dirt and gravel lot, but I think I would rather pay twice for a tree and not have this injury.

We also celebrated Christmas with the boys early because we had plans to fly out on Christmas day to go see Andy's father. Unfortunately, on the night of December 23rd we received the news that he had passed away. We were devastated that the boys (and Andy) would not get to see him again. We made the trip anyway, of course, but spent the week in SC with friends and family and attended the funeral services. Obviously, this was not how we envisioned spending our Christmas. The trip did afford us the opportunity to see more people, including my grandfather who had just gotten out of the hospital. I had upgraded to crutches by this time, but it is still not fun to travel and navigate airports, planes and rental cars being disabled. We tried our best to enjoy the time with friends, but of course it was overshadowed by Andy's father's death. We were really sorry that it worked out this way.

Before I post our Christmas season pics, I should take a moment to apologize for how poorly written this post is. I mean, how exactly do you write about a death in the family and a debilitating injury in the context of Christmas? We also decided in all of this that if our landlord doesn't let us stay month to month when our lease is up in February, we are just going to go ahead and head back East and figure things out as we go. More on that later.

Christmas season pics: