This Christmas we headed home to Columbus. It was a great trip, really great to get to see everybody. It was a long drive, so we ended up taking one day, driving to IL, then the second day driving the rest of the way. We did pretty well in the car when we drove early in the day – later in the day ends up being a crying competition between the 4 of us.

Before we left, we let Noah open a few of his presents from us so we didn’t have to take all of them. He had a great time with them, and for the first time was really into ripping the paper off.  It is fun enough watching him that I want to just give him a bunch of little boxes next time with paper on them to unwrap.

Once we were in Columbus, we had a great meal with the family – some of Kris’ brothers and sisters had to work on the holiday, so the schedule worked best to have the big meal on Friday.  It was fun.  Noah discovered the tree at Grandpa’s house, and had fun with all the toys that they have.  He had a blast with his cousins Owen and Adyln.  Owen and Noah end up running around playing with each other a lot, they seem to like the same sorts of things.  Noah liked the dogs – Mike has a Springer Spaniel named Bob and they’ve got a little mini mini collie named Polly.  She’s the same type of dog we had growing up (and Kris too), just seems like she stopped growing.  She’s really little, but Noah loved chasing her around.  Aly did really well with everybody, she’s been pretty content so far with things.

Here’s Owen (Lacey is holding him), you can see Ady and Michelle in the back.

Here’s Noah enjoying some presents from Grandma Mehling:

It was a really fun trip – we headed back after I cooked breakfast for Sam.  He’d worked all night on Christmas Day into his birthday (12/26), so we got up early and made chocolate chip pancakes.  They were really good, I cooked them with the largest cast iron pan I’ve ever seen.