A Weekend to Remember

Congratulations readers! For sticking with the blog for so long, you are getting a special treat tonight. That's right--a long awaited Billy post. I know. It is going to be epic.

A quick background before we dive into the meat of this post. The vast majority of the time (basically, every night unless I have to work late), I give the kids baths, bottles, read stories, rock them to sleep, whatever. I'm the closer at the end of Jenna's long day. When I rock them at night, I sing songs. And one important thing you need to know about me is that I love Christmas. I love the religious message, the songs, the decorations, the trees, the food, the lights, the characters, etc. I just love it. I love Christmas so much that of all of the songs that I know every single word of, half are Christmas songs. Because of this, our kids hear Christmas songs every night as they fade off to sleep. It doesn't matter if it is March or July, they hear them. Naturally, this led me to believe that Will and Cate will be really excited for Christmas when they reach the proper age. Cate obviously isn't there yet, but I thought this might be the first "excited" Christmas for Will. And man, I hit it right on the head.

We had a huge Christmas weekend planned for this past weekend. Between out of town trips and my brother's upcoming wedding (yea! Paige you have no idea what you are in for), this past weekend was really the only good time to do a lot of the Christmas stuff around town. We started off by hitting up the Children's Medical Center Holiday Parade. It was Saturday morning. The weather was fairly cold and it was misting at times. But it was a ton of fun. Cate sat on Jenna's lap wrapped in a blanket. Will was on my lap and could barely stay seated. We bought bleacher seats for the parade, which were first-come first-served. We ended up on the front row. Pretty awesome. Will loved the bands, floats, balloons, and all of the other great stuff in the parade.











I don't know why, but a group of Star Wars characters were in the parade. I'm not complaining, I enjoyed it (I admit, I was slightly jealous).







The drum majors for this band danced a lot. I think this might have been Jenna's favorite part of the parade.



An example of Will at the edge of his seat:



As I said earlier, Cate isn't really there yet on the whole Christmas excitement thing. She was so enthralled by the parade, she fell asleep.





Finally, no Christmas parade is complete without Santa Claus. This led nicely into our next event for the weekend, so I told Will to yell at Santa that he would see him later.



That afternoon, we gathered up and headed to Grapevine to catch a ride on the North Pole Express. This is a really cool train ride that you take and get a special visit from Santa Claus. We started at the Christmas decoration station and Will made his own Santa tree ornament. After that, there was a quick pre-boarding show and onto the train. It was a blast! Santa came by and introduced himself. Will asked for a choo-choo train for Christmas. Finally, Santa gave Will a jingle bell for riding on his train. All in all, a very cool adventure.

















On Sunday afternoon, we went back out to Grapevine to see the ICE! display at the Gaylord Texan. A pleasant surprise for us was all of the Christmas decorations at the Gaylord Texan. You can see the decorations in a few of the pictures below. This year the ICE! display is Shrek the Halls. For those of you that don't know, ICE! is a giant ice sculpture display based on some Chinese ice festival. Each year they tell a different story. The ice sculptures are amazing. To keep them formed properly, the temperature in the display is 3 degrees. That's right, 3 degrees. So, they tell you to wear a hat and gloves, and they require closed toe shoes. Before you go in, they give everyone (including kids) a full length parka to wear. I thought Jenna looked great in her parka. She would totally fit in in Siberia. Cate's parka didn't really fit, so she cuddled up inside of Jenna's. I think she might have been the warmest person there. I was a little afraid of the kids getting too cold, but Cate was really comfortable (so comfortable, she fell asleep again) and Will never said he was cold or asked to leave.











At the end of the display, there are giant ice slides. They literally carve a gigantic piece of ice into slides. It was awesome. The next picture was of Will going down the kiddie slide. He ended up on his belly going down, but I think he enjoyed it. I, of course, went down the big boy slide. That thing gets you moving. I recommend riding it if you go.







Like I said, a huge Christmas weekend. And I was really happy that Will had so much fun. All that singing paid off. (Ed. Note: I think my husband might have had just as much, if not more, fun than our two year old did.)

Finally, we had a big event this evening. I walked in from work just in time to catch Cate crawling! We were able to capture it on my phone for everyone's viewing pleasure:



Whew, I typed a lot. I'm tired, so I'm going to spare you my thoughts on the OU football season, the NBA lockout/condensed offseason/condensed schedule (advantage smart franchises with young teams--i.e., the Thunder), the economy, existentialism, the prisoner's dilemma, or titanium. Laters.