Merriments

Brad, Cora and I are in Michigan for the holidays this year. It's pretty exciting, not only because we have Cora this year, but because I think it's been at least three years since we've spent Christmas with my family. And who knows when the next time will be seeing as how flying becomes more and more expensive and it's not so easy to drive all the way here in the winter. So we're really enjoying this time together.

A note about flying during this time of year...never do it unless absolutely necessary. We were supposed to leave GJ on Thursday at 8 am and arrive in Grand Rapids at 2:41 pm (12:41 in CO) - about 5 hours with a stop over in Denver. Instead here's what happened: mechanical problems in GJ cause the plane to stay grounded until 10:30. Arrive in Denver around 11:30, one hour after our flight to GR left. There are no more flights until Sunday. Ouch. All flights to Chicago were full, so they sent us to Dallas/Fort Worth and then Chicago, arriving at 8 pm. Our luggage went to GR - how??? So after standing in two different lines for 2 hours (one for an airline credit and one to find out where our luggage was) my parents drove us to Holland, arriving at 1:30 am. Brad spent 40 minutes on the phone with United and was able to get our luggage delivered to my parents' house at 3 am. Unfortunately someone had to sign for it!

Anyway, we are thankful we didn't have to spend the night anywhere and that my parents were able and willing to drive all the way to Chicago to get us. It's not a great time of year to hang out in Chicago - and now knowing we wouldn't have had any luggage I'm glad we didn't decide to just spend a day touring the city. Brad's never been there and we've talked about spending some time there sometime, but this would not have been too pleasant!

Thankfully, Cora was a trooper the whole day! She had a 3 minute melt-down on the last flight, and she was so overly exhausted by the time we got in the car that she had a hard time unwinding and falling asleep, but otherwise she was a perfect traveler! We feel very thankful for that, because adding a stressed out baby to two stressed parents would not have helped things!