TX and NC

(our TN post is coming soon, I’m still working on collecting/organizing all the photos)

We drove roughly 5000 miles this trip! One person asked me during the trip how far we would be driving and I told them I wasn’t going to look until we got home. 😉 I headed to TX the week before Christmas for some quality grandparents’ time for the kids, then Nate flew into SA and we drove overnight to our week-long Tennessee Diltz gathering, then we drove back to Texas for a few more days and then did the 14 hour trek home after New Years.

The highlights of week one were baking and decorating cookies with both grandmas. Hannah did butter cookies with Gram and krumkake Grandma. We all helped with the decorating. 🙂 We don’t really ‘do’ santa at our house, but he visited a party we went to so the kids had their first ever picture with him. Hannah told him she didn’t really need anything for Christmas because she already had a lot of toys at home.

While we were in TN, we were incredibly blessed to be able to meet our dear friends who now live in North Carolina. He was a previous pastor and both of them were great friends to us. Their 3rd (out of 5) child is our God-daughter and we hadn’t seen her since 2007 right before Hannah was born. It was so wonderful to catch up and reconnect and hopefully create a memory of us for her since she was so young the last time we saw her.

We were able to stop overnight in Dallas on our way back from TN and got to see some of Nate’s extended family. We had a nice breakfast which was a treat and attended their church.

We barely made it back to Bandera in time to catch Nate’s brother, Chris and his family, before they headed back to Colorado. We fed those silly donkeys and had another mini-Christmas with them.

All photos can be viewed here. By the way, I’m pretty happy with our new camera. 🙂