springdellgirl: Christmas Break 2016

Christmas Break 2016: Part 1

We had such a fantastic Christmas break!! The festivities kicked off with Reilly flying home and getting to be here for 15 days. That was a treat for all of us! As kids grow up and move away and you only get a week here or five days there... to be able to have Reilly home for 15 days really felt like a nice substantial visit. Not that things were perfect but they were still pretty sweet.

I love these crazy kids!!

Reilly flew in Sunday night and we all stayed up eating and laughing late into the night. I think I had my very best night's sleep in a long time. All of us snug under one roof. I love it! The next morning Tyler went into work and came home at noon. That morning the kids and I made a bunch of lists...lists of all the food we wanted to eat...all the treats we wanted to make...all the things we wanted to do. This picture was taken about half way through Christmas break. We ended up doing about 99% of all of those things on our list. Not bad.

Once Tyler got home at noon we headed to Coeur d' Alene to play. Our first stop was for sushi. Our favorite sushi restaurant relocated from Spokane to Coeur d' Alene. Not cool but we were excited to eat all of our favorites again.

Even Bryn was going for it with her own little sushi boat!! Ailey is the only one who doesn't like sushi and was content to eat two orders of crab rangoon. Lunch was enjoyable and delicious! I miss having this place five minutes from my house. After lunch we shopped and wandered around Coeur d' Alene. We went into one of my favorite shops and I ran into my friend Erinn and her mom. It was great to see them!

After that we drove out to see the bald eagle nesting area. They were super active and flying over our heads. It was pretty cool. Bald eagles are yet another thing that I love about living in Spokane. There has been a bald eagle flying over our elementary school for the last week and there is a bald eagle that nests at our lake. They are so beautiful and to see so many at one time is truly spectacular!!

Lake Coeur d' Alene is so gorgeous no matter what the season or the weather.

The Johnson kids together again!! They are a wild and crazy bunch. Each one is different. They all have distinct and different personalities and yet they have a great time together usually mocking me and Tyler. As seen below!

Kameron is taller than both me and Reilly AND now even Reilly is taller than me! Crazy. I thought she was done growing!! I guess not. She is pretty proud about that fact too and loves to look down on me from her 3/4 of an inch. Ha!

After tromping around in the snow, taking pictures, and bald eagle watching we drove back to town and did a little more shopping and bumming around.

Then we headed to the CDA resort for some dessert.

Reilly and Kameron had never had the infamous gooeys before and they were ready to dig in. They really are pretty spectacular and they were not disappointed!!

We got the chocolate obsession, the strawberry shortcake, and the anniversary gooeys. They nearly did us in. They are so enormous that it took the six of us to eat them and even then we couldn't finish them all. The strawberry shortcake one is our very favorite!! Then it was back to our house that night for a late dinner...no one was hungry...and games. We also ran over to Kelley's house that night to see my mom was who was spending the night there before a procedure that she was having the next morning.

The next day my sister Kelley and I accompanied my mom to the hospital. She was having a bilateral cardiac catheterization to find out what was going on with her heart. She has never really rebounded after having her pulmonary blood clots last March. She hasn't regained much strength or stamina. She was always short of breath and has been pretty sedentary. That is not like her. We convinced her to go see a pulmonologist. She ended up seeing Dr. Elmer who is in my stake and he ran a whole battery of tests prior to Thanksgiving. All came back normal and showing that her lungs were healing. He wanted to rule out that her issues weren't heart related so my mom went to see a cardiologist and went through another battery of tests there. Some of her tests came back troubling. It looked like there was global left ventricular failure which was super scary. Her cardiologist wanted her to get in right away for a bilateral catheterization. The cardiologist who ended up doing her procedure was also from my stake, Dr. Huber, and it was awesome and comforting to have someone that you know and trust as her doctor. It was a long long day at the hospital. My Uncle Steve and Aunt Margaret also came to wait with us while my mom was having her procedure done. Tyler was holding down the fort with our kids and Reilly and Kameron were taking care of my mom's puppy. It was a little crazy.

The good news is that she came through her procedure just fine and the even better news is that her heart is just fine! Both her lungs and her heart sustained some damage that is still healing from the multiple blood clots and clot shower that she had in March. We were very relieved. Kelley and I were at the hospital with my mom from early in the morning until about 9:45 pm that night. It was a good thing that snapchat kept us amused!

I think we are pretty hot as old ladies!! Ha ha!!

The next day my mom was still recuperating at Kelley's house so Reilly and I spent the day checking on her. We hung out with her that morning and then went on a huge Costco and grocery store run to get all of our baking supplies and food for Christmas. We stopped back in to check on her again and to bring her lunch. We had a big gourmet feast and a fun afternoon together. My mom was able to head back home late that afternoon.

Reilly and the girls made another Gingerbread house. This time it was the one from Trader Joes. A little A-Frame.

That night Tyler and the kids and I packed into the suburban and drove around and looked at all the Christmas lights. The kids wanted to get hot chocolate to drink while we drove around but some how we were conned into doing a Taco Bell run. So while we drove around for the next two hours it was a Taco Bell fest. It was a Christmas miracle (to them) as I despise fast food. We had a great time looking at the lights, laughing, and singing Christmas songs. Then Bryn had a bit of a traumatic incident occur. I'll let her note to the tooth fairy do the talking. :)

Luckily the tooth fairy rewarded her with double the money she usually gets for her trauma. Ha ha!!

The next day was our all day bakefest. We had Christmas music blaring and Christmas movies going all day long and we downed chex mix and caffeine and had dance parties to get through it all!!

Tyler and Kameron making fudge.

This is our new favorite Christmas movie. We all loved it. It will definitely be a new Johnson Christmas classic. It even has our family's favorite Christmas song in it...not once but TWICE. (Sting's Soul Cakes) We were stoked!!

This year we made:

Chocolate Crinkle Cookies
Reilly's Frosted Pink Coconut Cookies
Frosted Lemon Cookies
Chocolate No-Bake Cookies
Grandma Ellersick's Coconut Macaroons
Fruity Pebble Rice Crispy Treats
Amy Allman's Fudge
Butter Pecan Fudge
Chocolate Peanut Butter Balls

(Everything was delicious!!)

We also had a Nog Off that night. We love eggnog and every year we see all kinds of different flavors of eggnog and we are always curious to try them so this year we did. Big mistake. They were all nasty. When the holiday "nog" made with coconut milk is the best one you know they were NOT good! We will stick with our usual plain Darigold eggnog thank you very much!

**Funny side note...growing up we did not drink eggnog in the McClellan household. I thought it sounded absolutely disgusting. When Tyler and I were dating he FORCED me to try it. He literally held me down and made me swallow it because he knew that I would like it even though I thought eggy milk sounded revolting. I am so glad he did. Btw...he has done that with several other thing too like sauerkraut and thousand island dressing and beets to name a few. Ha ha!! I was right about beets though. Nasty.**

The next day we took the kids Christmas shopping. They were buying for each other and for Tyler and then later that night Tyler took the kids shopping for me. Reilly's shopping was already done before she came. (Good girl!) But she came along to give advice. The only serious mishap we had was when Reilly was trying to be sly and making a purchase for Tyler from the kids and she LEFT MY DEBIT CARD in the self check out at Fred Meyer. I about died! Luckily for me (AND HER!!) some kind soul turned it in.

The presents were starting to pile up around the tree.

That night we did our own version of Jenna Tries...aka Johnson Tries. Jenna Tries is the instagram account that we all follow of the girl who tries all the weird snack and junk food. The kids wanted to do our own and to video it. It was pretty funny. (To us.) So if you need some junk food recommendations...here you go:

Bryn:

Reilly:

Ailey:

Kam:

Tyler:

As for my treat...Let's just say the Bamba, a treat from Israel, was disgusting. It tasted like packing peanuts with peanut butter dust that was neither sweet nor salty. Thumbs down.

The hands down winner was the pepperoncini kettle chips. They were so good that we bought a second bag over the holidays. The chocolate covered potato chips were a distant second.

We wrapped a ton of gifts and made a ton of cookie plates and delivered them all. We watched so many Christmas movies not to mention the Gilmore Girls Revival and binge watched a whole bunch of other shows. We played in the snow. We slept in. We ate out constantly because who feels like cooking dinner when you have been baking all day. Not me! We played so many games and generally had an awesome time as we waited for the big day to arrive!