Around this time every year for the past five years, we've been getting ready to board an airplane and spend Thanksgiving with Matt's parents in St. George, Utah. My kids don't know this holiday any other way. To them, Thanksgiving is always spent with cousins, aunts, and uncles they don't get to see very often. It's about making gingerbread houses with Grandma Kathy. It's when Matt goes golfing with his dad. And even for me, Thanksgiving is now about enjoying a little desert air before heading back to face an East Coast winter and stuffing myself with turkey and Cafe Rio. It's also about figuring out how in the world we're going to get a full-sized gingerbread house through airport security intact on the trip home.
So I'm a little sad to report that we won't be flying west for the holiday this year. Part of it is that the trip just seems like a lot of effort considering we can't stay as long as we used to now that Ella is in school. But most of the reason has to do with this:
This was Lucy on the plane as we were getting ready to take off to Orlando for our Disney trip back in September. She looks angelic, doesn't she?
Well, this was her after that flight on the Magical Express bus to our Disney resort:
Yeah, that bus ride wasn't so "magical" for me or anyone else who was lucky enough to be on board with us.
So this year, instead of flying for five hours we'll be driving for two to spend Thanksgiving with cousins, an aunt, and an uncle who we luckily do get to see fairly often. We won't have Grandma Kathy to help with the gingerbread houses but we will have Grandpa Paul (aka my dad) visiting from Oregon. Maybe Matt can play pickleball with him instead of golf? Sadly there's really no replacement for Cafe Rio, but there's always my old standby Panera Bread. And at the very least, we won't have any gingerbread houses stuffed into overhead bins this year... or screaming and belligerent one-year-olds sitting in a window seat.