Post-Holiday Reality Check

I started my first week back without motivation of a day off in almost 3 weeks. Before I get to that, though, let me go back and see what I can recall with Christmas and New Years.

Christmas was a blast as always. We spent a portion of Christmas-Eve at Jenny's family's home, had a great dinner and enjoyed each other's company in preparations for the evening. We decided to head home so we could put the kids to bed around 8:00, but both of them were fast asleep before we even got home. I had my traditional "Muppet Christmas Carol" showing without the boys before heading to bed myself. Even at 28, I still can't make it past about 5:00 on Christmas morning in anticipation of the big morning. Even when I pretty much know what's coming, it's still exciting. This Christmas, no one else shared my enthusiasm, so I laid in bed awake until about 6:00 until Jae started crying in his bed. I let him cry long enought to wake Jenny up and played it off like I was asleep the whole time, a good move if I do say so myself.

The boys had a great Christmas. They both got way too much crap (which led to the majority of our activities between Christmas and New Year: Filling every nook and cranny of our house with new crap!). We found out that Jaegan would have been entirely content with a roll of wrapping paper and some tissue. He spent some time rolling around in our present fodder and thoroughly enjoyed himself. It was pretty funny. Boston would want to open everything and play with it right away, so he probably would have been great getting one thing. He got mad at us a couple of times when we told him that he had more presents under the tree and couldn't play with whatever it was he just openend. After about an hour of straight present ripping, we had a little time to play before heading over to my parents house for my dad's traditional Christmas Crepes breakfast! It was all I look forward to all year and more! We spent most of the remainder of the day at Jenny's parent's home opening the last of our presents and visiting with family there. Ted and Karen had prepared a Christmas feast with probably close to 40 family and friends. It was a lot of fun and the boys loved playing with their cousins.

The days following are a blur in my mind. I took Christmas Eve, Christmas and the day after off, so I had 5 straight days of no work. My dad took us skiing on the Saturday after Christmas and it was frigging cold. I don't think my core body temperature had returned to normal yet, nearly two weeks later. The snow was pretty good, though.

The next week was another short week as I worked on New Year's Eve, but took New Year's Day and Friday off. We spend New Year's Eve with Matt and Sarah at their home, most of the time playing Guitar Hero World Tour and eating Sarah's Cafe Rio rip-off Sweet Pork Burritos. It was a good night. Boston stayed up the whole time and we're still paying for it!

Of course, it was great to watch the Utes win, even for a BYU fan. You can't take anything away from what they were able to do this year. It was a great game and, hopefully, will help solidify what the top teams of the MWC are made of!

That pretty much leads us back to today. I'm sure that Jenny will have much more detail to share on the past couple of weeks, but for me, I'm refocused on work and getting my life back to normal. More than once, I heard this time referred to as "Re-Boarding." I thought it was funny, but it's a true statement. It's a little hard to go back to work when you've been looking forward to something for months and now it's past. The days worked out well that I got a fair amount of time off over the New Year, but it's also good to get back into the swing of things with work and normal life.

I keep having to tell Boston that Christmas isn't coming again until next year. As much as I'd love to have Christmas every day, it would lose it's magic if it came every day, once a week, even once a month. The tradition, the spirit, the magic of Christmas should only come once a year. That's what I love about it. That's what makes it special.