Recovering with... NO CHAOS!!!

We made it back to good ole Colo-rady!!!!

We spent the last six days at home in Pennsylvania visiting my family. Yes, I call PA home. I grew up in Nebraska, but anyone who dares to ask my state of origin gets told that a little further east is where I call home. Luckily, everywhere we went we missed the snowstorms that have been creating havoc through the east coast. Either we arrived a day before the snow hit or the day after and the roads were already cleared. How we ended up making it back I couldn't even begin to tell you. The Baltimore airport was crazy on Tuesday. Flights were cancelled. There was delay after delay. The airport even shut down at 3 p.m. and will be opening back up here shortly today. How we got so lucky is beyond me. Even my parents are stuck in Middletown with my grandma until Friday.

We had a great time visiting with family. My mom's parents have traveled out to Nebraska in their camper trailer twice this past year and got to see their newest great-grandbabies. While we were there, we had a great family reunion at the fire hall. It was so wonderful to see aunts and uncles, cousins and their kids, great aunts and uncles, and family friends that I haven't seen in over 11 years! We had fun showing off our precious little girl! The family also got to meet Jake for the first time. He survived all of the introductions; and probably to his relief he never got his memory tested to see what he retained. It was fun for me to finally give him a name to go along with all of the stories he has heard over the years. And let me tell you, there are a couple of crazy ones. It was such a wonderful afternoon reminiscing about all of the memories, while trying to negate who was telling the truth or adding a few embellishments to a good old tale.

We then took Jake through State College to show him the Penn State Campus. We met up with some of my parent's college professors, now retired, at the Meats Lab. We had a great time touring the lab while Dr. Sherritt showed us the renovations and Dad remember the times he spent at his college residence. Dr. Sherritt even embarrassed the poor guy living in Dad's old room in the basement by not only knocking on the door but insisting that we could come in and look around. We took our picture with good ol' Joe Pa (well, the statue at least) in front of the football stadium before driving around looking at the rest of the brick buildings on campus.

We then made our way to G-ma's. We entered the house to, at no one suprise, seeing her beating Aunt Cathy at Rummy. G-ma, or Granny as we are known to call her, had only seen Kenzie in pictures. Muchkin May was not shy at all to catch her up on what she has missed in the last 14 months. We had a great visit with everyone on my Dad's side of the family at the church. We got Jake thoroughly confused on the lay of the land as we drove through Middletown to visit other family that couldn't make it out in the snow, to get our Penn State garb for the upcoming football season, and random other trips out into the frigid and always quite humid weather. We all had fun re-reading history, putting new notes in the history book, and completely teasing G-ma about being a "cheater" at cards. She really isn't a cheater. The cards just love her and our only recourse is to torture her while making ourselves feel better about the butt whooping we were just dealt. Kenzie made a big show of blowing kisses, playing on her couch, and just being the little attention lover that she is.

The flight from Denver was uneventful and we were praying for the same on the return flight. But much to our dismay, we weren't so lucky. We got delayed an hour and left the runway about 45 minutes after our revised scheduled departure. This meant that Kenzie was awake almost three hours past an already extended naptime. I don't think anyone realizes how many steps you take trying to keep up with a little girl as she roams the airport terminal. Unfortunately, this didn't lead to a long nap. This Momma was hoping for a 4 hour snooze so that I could relax and read my book for a while uninterrupted. I wasn't quite that lucky. Kenzie only slept 45 minutes. Thankfully, we had a little girl named Katie traveling with her Mom and two brothers sitting beside us. The two little girls had a wonderful time playing peek-a-boo, reading books, and all sorts of other games. I will forever be indebted to the sweet little girl that had a fabulous time playing with Squirt Little.

As you can guess by now, we arrive at DIA 2 hours later than scheduled which lead to us getting into the thriving metropolis of Nunn also 2 hours late. By the time we got Kenzie to bed, relieved our bladders, and retrieved our luggage from the car, we were already exhausted. Running on fumes alone, Jake did chores and checked out the crew while I got dinner going (props to the Marie Calendar employee that decided they should make frozen pot pies), unpacked and put away the contents of our bags, and started a few loads of laundry. We ate dinner about 9 p.m. after finishing all of our "need to do tonight" task list. I was bummed about our late evening. I didn't have time to unwind from the day's adventures. It was already time to hit the sack so that I would get enough sleep in me to be some what coherent on my first day back to work. Boy, did I need that down time considering I drank an AMP just three hours prior. Energy drinks definitely get me wired for quite a while. I should know this by now and should be better about succumbing to the temptation but sometimes resisiting is a little rough after such a long day. After watching some brainless, pre-recorded shows on our DVR, I ended up going to bed later than I would have liked. It was so nice to sleep in my painfully, uncomfortable bed. But it is familiar and I was so excited to sleep at home after our little get-away.

Today, as I work on getting caught up with the mounds of paperwork on my desk, I am actually suprisingly relaxed. Typically when we get home from vacation, we have bags, clothes, and miscellaneous everything scattered everywhere. This leads to the next few week of frustration as I look at my cluttered house still feeling too jet-lagged to do anything about it. Finally, I get so worked up that I would spend my whole day off cleaning and getting back to normal. But this time is different. There is no chaos!!! Granted I have three mounds of laundry that still need tackled, but other than that my house is picked up. Well, I take that back. The office continues to look like the tornado to hit Colorado in 2008 is trapped and circulating the area that is supposed to be called a room. Well, the door is closed and I can't see the mess. Problem solved! At least for now... I do have some cleaning to do: carpet that needs swept, tile that needs mopped, sinks that need shined. The list is suprisingly small for once. I am really excited about that. It means I get to have fun playing with my little girl tonight instead of working until the wee hours of the morning. Maybe even take a bubble bath and read a few pages in that book of mine...