Family Day

When Grandpa Trout & Grammy Lo sent us money for Christmas this year, we decided to spend part of it having a fun family day - so yesterday, the 22nd, became a family day.

The first item on the agenda was a trip to the movie theater to see Hotel Transylvania. Lee took Morgan and Brynne to see the movie while Melissa and I stayed home so Melissa (wink, wink) could nap.

Once the movie was over, we tried to do really, really fast family pictures. The plan was to hop out of the car (in the cold wind), smile for one minute straight with hopes that Melissa would join us in smiling for at least one of the pictures, and then hop right back into the car. Well, I actually did have big hopes of also getting a quick individual picture of each of the older girls (taking another 20-40 seconds each). I personally didn't feel like this was asking a lot, especially compared to hour-long photo sessions with a whole bunch of poses. My girls, however, thought it was the end of the world. (Apparently they hadn't been briefed that the end of the world was actually the day before - Dec. 21, 2012.) I have very, very small hopes of there being any nice pictures to show for our efforts (and the efforts of my friend Denise who was nice enough to take our pics again).

At the end of pictures, we picked up some Wendy's frosties and headed to Lowe's Extreme Air Sports for some active fun. Doesn't this look like fun:

The next item on the agenda was a yummy dinner, provided kindly by Chuck-A-Rama. Using the last of our free kid's meal coupons, we got ourselves some yummy food. The meal was made even more memorable by the fact that Morgan and Brynne sat by each other without even fighting!!!!!

The last thing we did was drive around looking at Christmas lights. We spent most of our time driving through the hills of Mapleton where the homes are just a little bit big (i.e. hello! really? who needs that big of a house?). With big houses come lots of places to attach lights, so we got to see our share of them.

We got home just in time to get little Melissa off to bed, followed closely by not-quite-as-little Lee (who had been up early to help someone with a flying requirement). I wish we could say we made it through the whole day without any fighting, but that would be a miracle that was not to happen this time. We did have lots of fun, though, and hopefully fun memories that will last! Thank you Grandpa Trout and Grammy Lo!