We celebrated Christmas on the 23 and left for Nick and Janine's on the morning of the 24th. We had a great time at their house and enjoyed sharing Christmas day with their family. Our train was running about three hours late, so we ended up leaving Salt Lake about 7am, which was great since we had about a foot of snow fall over night and Nick had to dig our car out of the driveway! Thanks Nick!
The train trip was a great experience! It was cool to sit and watch the beautiful scenery fly by. It was a little hard to get used to the motion. When you went from one car to the next it was almost scary and very rattly, the cars definitely don't seal tightly together. I did love not having to drive and I read a whole book. The hardest part was trying to sleep at night. It's pretty loud and the seats are a bit hard to sleep in. On the trip to Nebraska it was fairly empty, so I put Ryan in two seats by himself, so he could lie down. That worked great. On the way home the train was really crowded so that wasn't possible. All in all it was a fun experience, but I think a maximum of 12hours instead of 24hrs. on the train would be ideal.
We had a great time over Shane and Casey's. We were so happy to see all the kids, it took Parker about a day and a half to get snuggly with us. We miss having them close! I was surprised how much York reminded me of Springfield. It's a nice little country town, without mountains of course. There were a lot of cool old homes with columns and lots of character. I couldn't help thinking how much Megan's mom would love to see them. Shane took me on a tour of his work and it was so modern and efficient. I'm amazed at how much he's learned about corn this past year.
Several of the pictures are our trip to an Aviation Museum by Omaha. It had a lot of hands on activities for kids. Ryan loved it and wished he could have stayed all day. We also went to the Winter Quarters Temple and visitor's center. It was really interesting. It sure made me appreciate the luxury's I take for granted. I'm sure the pioneers would have loved taking a train to Salt Lake, instead of pulling a handcart with everything they owned inside.
I know this is running a bit long, so I'll just some it up by saying it was a great holiday with tons of fun memories.
I forgot to give you an update on my Diabetes research study. I finally got to start on the medication on the 5th of January. In two weeks my blood sugars have gone from an average of 285-400 down to about 129! Normal blood sugars are 80 to 130 so I am doing great!
