Home at last!

It's so nice to be home.  We arrived in Galena safe and sound yesterday after close to 28 hours on the road.  We spent Friday night in Kayenta, AZ - which I posted about previously.  It truly is in the middle of NOWHERE! We got on the road around 7:30am on Saturday, mainly due to me basically not going to sleep all night - I was up at 4:30am and took a shower and wrote the blog and then got everything packed up and ready.  We stopped at Four Corners Park, which is where Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado and Utah meet and took a few pictures. We took the back roads from AZ to Denver and the ride thru the mountains was just beautiful.

  It definitely got us in a more “Christmasy” mood driving thru the mountains.  We were on 2 lane windy roads, and quite often there was a stream right along side the road, which was really neat.  Colorado truly is a beautiful state.  I wouldn’t mind living there someday.

 

Saturday night we spent the night with my aunt and uncle who live in Denver.  They fed us DELICIOUS food and it was nice to see them since I don’t get to spend much time with them or see them often.  Abbie had her own room and it took us a little while to get her to sleep, but once she was asleep, she stayed asleep all night, which was very nice.  We all got sleep.

We spent Sunday night in Lincoln, NE.  Abbie had had enough of the car seat and we wanted to see the finale of Survivor, so we stopped driving around 6:45pm.  I was dreading being in the same room as Abbie again, but surprisingly she slept all night!  I had to wake her up in the morning.  And I got up a few times at night to make sure she was still breathing since I wasn’t hearing a peep out of her.

We got on the road a little later than we’d wanted on Monday, around 9:30am and we got home at 4pm.  Abbie did REALLY well in the car the last day.  She did well overall the entire trip, but we were expecting her to be done with riding by Monday.  Monday was probably her best day so far.  And the cherry on top was her sleeping really well for us Monday night.  We had to wake her up this morning too!

Today I had lunch with my friend Rachel, and she also cut and colored my hair.  The last time I did anything with my hair was when Rachel did it when I was home for my baby shower in APRIL…  Oops.  I’m going to have to fly her to Germany next I guess so she can do my hair.  My dad and Mark worked on the Explorer and replaced the brakes pads and rotors.  Abbie spent the morning with my mom, which was kinda funny.  My mom about had a bird when I told her Mark and I might take Abbie with us because he was originally going to go to town with me and he hadn’t seen Abbie much this past week since he was so busy at work.  My mom said she never gets to see Abbie so she wanted us to leave her with her.  So Abbie was with her and my mom quickly found out that you get nothing else done when Abbie is around and awake.  So on my way home she told me to “hurry up because she had things to do”.  Ha.  Tell me about it.

Tomorrow I’m supposed to have lunch with my friend Beth and also visit my friend Billie and her kids, but I’m not sure the weather is going to cooperate. 

I told Mark next time we come to IL we need to stay at our parents house for a length of time proportionate to the number of people we’re visiting at each place.  We’re visiting 18 people while we’re at my house – family and friends that I’ve kept in touch with and want to see.  My grandma and one of my cousin’s and his fiancé are here now.  My cousins and their kids are coming on Sunday and there are about 6-8 friends I’m hoping to see while we’re here.  We’re visiting 5 people at his house – all of whom will be in the same house as us the entire time we’re there.  It doesn’t seem fair to me that we spend a week at each place, when I have to try to cram all my visits with more than 3 times more people into the same amount of time we’re visiting 5 people in Chicago.  But if we did the visits by my theory (# of people we’re visiting is proportionate to # of days our visit is at each place) we’d spend 11 days in Galena and 3 days in Chicago.  I don’t think his family would go for that, but next time we’re definitely going to spend more time in Galena so I can catch up with all my friends.  I just wish I knew when that “next time” would be at this point..

(Abbie with great-grandma Ruth)