The Vanderwal's: Merry Christmas & Happy New Year!

Merry Christmas & Happy New Year everyone! We just got back from a very relaxing vacation to visit Kevin's parents in Enderby, BC. It has been 5 years since were have been there for Christmas so it was a well needed trip. We left on Saturday morning, Dec 21st at 6:30 am and had a quick flight to Denver and a very quick layover there. We then had a 2 hour flight to Seattle of which Amelia chose to scream for 1.5 hours. She was so tired but would not get settled down. We passed her back and forth and nothing helped. After throwing her paci and baby on the floor about 20 times, squirting one of those applesauce pouches on top of her head, and a lot of looks from the other passengers, she fell asleep as we were getting ready to descend. We then had a 3 hour layover in Seattle so we got some lunch, found a large kids play area (which had to have been so germy I can't think about it for long), and found a bunch of empty hallways for the girls to run and look out the window. After that it was just a quick one hour flight to beautiful Kelowna. The flight from Seattle to Kelowna is always a pretty small plane--turbo prop style, and they offer complimentary wine and beer. I am sure they do that because the plane is kinda scary ;) but traveling with children changes you...haha. This is the first time that Kev and I had to say no thanks. Anyway, the rest of the trip was great. The girls were amazing sleepers every night and took great naps--which also means we got sleep and were able to take naps. We got to read, play games, go snowshoeing, Boxing Day shopping, and just hang out. Quinn was a little nervous about the cows the first day or so but she eventually came around. Amelia thought they were neat! The girls had so much fun playing with their girl cousins Taylor and Sydney and they gave their aunt and uncle Dan and Kristen a look into what life with twins is like. They are expecting twins in May--so exciting.

We were hoping for a boring trip home but there are always surprises when traveling. On the way home (Sun, Dec 29) we traveled from Kelowna to Calgary and then to Chicago. When we landed in Chicago we noticed there was a line of airplanes just sitting in a row but not at a gate or anything. Our plane pulled up next to them and it was announced that there were no available gates and that all of these planes were waiting for their gate to free up. We got nervous because it was only going to be a 40 minute layover. Well an hour later we finally got a gate ( I am pretty sure the flight we were waiting for was our flight to Sioux Falls). I ran ahead with Amelia to see if the SF flight had left and it had. It was the last one to SF that night. Kevin got in the ginormous line at United Customer Service while I found the girls some supper. A bit later Kevin called me to see if I could find another United CS center which was supposed to be in another terminal. So I trekked around that airport and found it....almost no line! So I called him back and he ran over to meet me. It was pretty crazy. The girls were AMAZING during this whole time. I thought they were going to get antsy or whiny because it was getting late but they were such troopers. United gave us a hotel and food vouchers so we caught the shuttle to the hotel--which ended up being very nice but only had 1 pack n play to offer us. So the girls had to share and they did well. They probably slept better than we did. We were up again at 5:30 to catch the 6 am shuttle back to the airport. Security did not take long and then we redeemed our food vouchers for some well deserved Starbucks....an Iced Caramel Brulee Latte to be exact. Anyway, we were on the 8:15 flight back to SF and we all took an amazing nap when we got home.
On New Years Day we celebrated Christmas with my family in Rock Rapids. I think the girls were still catching up on sleep because we finally had to wake them up from there nap after 3 hours. It was another very relaxing day filled with coffee, treats, soup, and football. Wish there could be more days like that!

Here are some pics of our trip. Thanks Anthony and Maria for letting us borrow some of your boys' outdoor clothes....we joked at how much the girls looked like little boys :) But it totally saved us some packing room!