Sweet home.

Home is sweet indeed!

Both 'home' Minnesota, and 'home' New Hampshire.

We got to go home (Minnesota) for Christmas, and it was fantastic!

We had decided some time ago, that we wouldn't go home for Christmas. We couldn't afford to fly, and making that drive in the winter seemed a little extra overwhelming. 

As Christmas neared, however, following through with being away from family got harder and harder
to swallow.
We gave in.
We loaded up and hit the road. 

The plan: Drive straight through on the way there, and make one over night stop on our drive home. This plan was NOT a good one.....well when your driving 1500 miles there is no 'good' plan, but trying to drive straight through was just stupid (obvious, I know. Clearly we weren't thinking straight!) 

So we hit the road at about 2pm, and as soon as the sun went down, BLIZZARD! "oh yeah, THIS is why we weren't going to make this drive in the winter!" All night, from sun down to sunrise, we were alternating between an hour or two of blizzard and an hour or two of heavy rain, it was SO stressful! Once the sun was up and the snow stopped we were counting tractor trailers in the ditch....there were a ton of them. 

The kids did pretty great considering they were in the car for 28 hours. I brought their stocking stuffers and handed them out one at a time, each time we got to a new state. We also rigged up the iPad to watch movies. Once upon a time I was against movies on road trips, but I'm glad we had it for this one!

Eventually we made it! HOME. Sweet sweet home.  I had never been away from home for more then a couple of months, max. Eight months felt like an eternity! It's funny, saying it 'out loud' like this makes me feel like quite the wuss! 8 months is SO NOT that long. I was great to be back in the cold drafty house of my youth! I even got to put my slippers to use. 

Hanging out with my family again and John's older son was truly wonderful! My family is as awesome as new England is pretty. Yep! That's wicked awesome, in case you were wondering. 

The week went on with lots of sledding, oodles of yummy food, truck loads of sugar (seriously, got insulin?), and the best part? Just being in the company of the ones I love. It really doesn't matter what we are, or are not doing,  just being, is all I need.

And so we headed home. With the safer plan of spending a night. It really didn't help the drive though.....it just made it feel more dragged out. Not to mention the second day was an all out blizzard, the entire 15(ish) hours of driving. We were literally following the heaviest part of the storm from Ohio to New Hampshire. To say that it sucked would be the understatement of the century. 

Once again, though, we made it, and for the first time we saw our (New Hampshire) home blanketed with thick white fluffy snow, home never looked so sweet.