Dates: December 23, 2018 to January 2, 2019

Location: Our daughter and son-in-law’s home near Tacoma, Washington

We headed into Christmas with Malcolm catching yet another cold after our flight back from Hawaii. That ended up turning into a full-fledged sinus infection on Christmas Eve afternoon. Of course, nothing could be done until the day after Christmas (aside from an emergency room visit), so he soldiered on through Christmas festivities as best he could.

We had a really nice evening service at church on Sunday, the 23rd. The evening service had the children singing and presenting the Christmas message. Elizabeth played the flute and Scarlet and Violet were up on stage. Violet had a speaking role, as well.

After the choir presentation, the children came down to sit with their families and the remainder of the service was a candlelight service as we sang a couple of familiar hymns.

On Christmas Eve, we headed over to Cole’s parents’ house for the traditional Christmas Eve dinner. A lot of the family and some friends stopped by. Malcolm relaxed with one of his friends.

On Christmas morning, we all opened gifts. Our son David joined us via FaceTime since he had to stay home and work on getting insurance matters straightened out in getting his house fixed.

Malcolm got a set of socks, one pair for each day of the week and an extra pair for “laundry day”. Since Christmas was on Tuesday…

Later on Christmas Day, we headed over to Cole’s parents’ home again for Christmas dinner and to do the annual gift exchange.

The day after Christmas, Val drove Malcolm to the doctor’s office to get checked on. He was prescribed antibiotics and nasal spray to relieve the symptoms. He was feeling better after a couple days on medication.

After Christmas, Malcolm stayed home and the rest of the crew headed out to the mall. The girls had gift cards for lunch and for Build-A-Bear.

We didn’t do a lot of activities, but did end up going to the zoo on the Saturday after Christmas. Bullseye the horse left clues around the house and in the car for the girls to figure out where we were going.

It was cold and started raining while we were at the zoo, but we had a good time anyway. Many of the animals and exhibits were inside, so we enjoyed those. Malcolm took his camera with him and captured quite a few pictures and put them in his gallery: [Click Here].

We let the girls stay up for a while to watch the ball drop on New Years Eve, but found out it was delayed two hours so it would be 11:00 before they could see it, so it was off to bed when they got really tired.

Our flight home left late in the evening on Wednesday, January 2nd, so we got to spend most of the day with the girls and Elizabeth (Cole had gone back to work). Scarlet had woken up that morning sick, so we took Violet out to lunch while Elizabeth and Scarlet stayed home. It was Violet’s choice and we ended up at McDonalds.

Scarlet was feeling well enough to eat part of a kids meal, so we picked on up on the way out the door and took it home to her.

On Wednesday evening we said our goodbyes to the girls and Elizabeth a little early to avoid disrupting bedtime too much. Cole took us to the airport and dropped us off. We were more than 3 hours early and the lines for security were really light (plus we have PreCheck, which helped as well). Our plane left a little late, about 11:15 PM and got to Orlando a little late, around 8:00 AM eastern time.

Dates: January 3 to 7, 2019

Location: Our RV Lot at Deer Creek RV Golf and Country Club

Our neighbor, Jim Lee, picked us up at the airport and brought us home. We dropped all our suitcases in the guest house (to sort through later) and ended up napping the rest of the morning until past noon. We headed out and grabbed some lunch, then picked up our mail from the post office. Malcolm got a little bit of work in during the afternoon and again on Thursday.

On Friday, Malcolm didn’t have any work assigned to him, so he decided to tackle the dishwasher installation in the trailer. He worked on that Friday afternoon and most of Saturday. We’re pleased with the installation. Malcolm will detail that install in an upcoming blog post.

For now, it’s just back to work for Malcolm and the usual life around here for both of us.