Once we got home from Thanksgiving it was time to prep for the next adventure: Christmas in Colorado.
We were flying this time.
David and I made our 2022 Christmas trip to Colorado in the van. It was our first official van trip. It was cold. We were warm in the van and got lucky with no snow, but December – even in northern Arizona and New Mexico – is not a trip we wanted to repeat.
The two weeks following Thanksgiving were a whirlwind of cleaning house and packing for our flight.
For one thing, packing was ridiculous because Colorado was experiencing warmer weather than Eugene. I didn’t have a clue what to pack and still fit it into our one checked bag. We went heavy on the warm weather clothing and light on the cold weather. Good thing we did. On Christmas day the temperature reached 72 degrees.
The next puzzle was transportation to the airport. David checked in to parking our Kia at the Eugene airport. At $19 a day for 2 weeks that was out. We decided to Uber until our wonderful neighbors, B&G, offered to drive us and pick us up when we got home.
When we arrived at our daughter’s house we found a very sick woman. My daughter had what appeared to be a very bad cold or an upper respiratory infection. It was later diagnosed as a sinus infection.
Grandma and grandpa took over. That first week we were more nurse, cook, and housekeeper than grandparents.
Since our daughter was feeling so ill we took the boys to jui jitsu twice. It was interesting. I had never been to the boys jui jitsu classes so this was a new experience for me.
Grandson #3 is the smallest of all our grandsons and the smallest in the class. Watching him work so hard for this was inspiring. And he got his first stripe on his belt.
Because grandson #1’s class is more advanced, there are more age levels and more people in the class. That meant getting any photos of him was impossible.
As I mentioned, our daughter was sick so we pretty much stuck to the house.
She and I did a bit of Christmas shopping one day. Another day we went over to her sister-in-law’s house to take care of some laundry that her sister-in-law did not have time to finish before she left for the holidays.
Anyone with children will tell you about the many stages of Children at Christmas. The first few years are very relaxed and take hours to all day to work through presents. Then there is the stage where the process is reduced to the morning hours. Our grandsons are at the second stage. Stockings and Santa presents take about 30 minutes then the rest of the morning is opening gifts under the tree. At the first stage there are many opportunities for adorable pictures. The second stage, not so much.
The photos here are about the best I could get. At 7 and 4 there is a lot of rapid movement.
We went out as a family on two different days to two different parks.
At the parks David, our daughter, and son-in-law played disc golf and the boys and I played on the playground equipment.
One of those days was Boxing Day and I was not feeling well. The temperature decided to start dropping that afternoon and I was feeling worse as the afternoon wore on. I was pretty much worthless the rest of the weekend and I was getting on a plane the following Tuesday.
I was well enough to fly home, but boy did the flight take its toll. I was pretty much in recovery mode through New Year’s day. And that’s how I ended the year.
Content for this post was limited, Some months are like that. So I perused my photo library for some photos from 2025 that may not have been included (if there are duplicates, I apologize) and decided a photo “dump” was due. After all we are closing out 2025.
Here’s hoping 2026 is better for all of us.
