Christmas, summarized

We had a holly jolly Christmas in Arkansas. It really is the best time of the year. Here are some highlights.

A highly successful road trip--to and from Arkansas. The girls were fabuloso, and the car behaved like the champ she is. Mary Poppins helped from time to time, as well as the irresistible soporific effects of a moving vehicle...

Mom was ON. No matter how little sleep she gets, no matter how many people are crammed into her house, she always is a basket of cheeriness and ready to go--homemade cinnamon rolls, late-night chats, back rubs, Skip-Bo into the wee hours...You name it. She's the Queen of Conway Christmas. Did I mention that, inexplicably, she had the youngest Wii Age of us all (including some seasoned gamers) on first try??!! Man, if only I had a photo of that.

But then again, she does have her tragic flaw: a refrigerator with no cold Pepsi! AAH! (Here she is in a desperate, noble effort to quickly chill a bottle of Pepsi before her ladylike composure disappears down the drain. Sorry, Mom. It's really not a secret anymore.).

Granddad (aka: Radioactive Man) was in good spirits and always around to lend a hand...

Or a handlebar.

Aunts and uncles and cousins and siblings...Christmas wouldn't be Christmas without a flock of noisy family clucking around, in my opinion. And did I mention they're all kind of crazy? Ava placed so much trust and admiration in these two suspicious characters below that she'd have followed them off a cliff.

Kalie kept the kids entertained with her fascinating repertoire of animal noises (unlike her husband Scott who only does one animal: a monkey, though he does it with such passion and realism that he became known by Ava and Cousin Lilly as "The Monkey"). Here is Kalie popping up from behind the sofa as a new animal each time, to the shrieking delight of her nieces.

And she's also an excellent cuddler of babies:

Brian and Crissy (not pictured) also made an appearance. Even though we were bummed they couldn't stay longer, it was fun having them around. Brian was a doting uncle, as usual, and is soon to be a doting daddy, too (yea!). We can't wait to see the little baby cuteness that those two concoct.

Hannah, my oldest niece, is suddenly a tall and beautiful young woman. Yikes. I mean, she's always been beautiful, but she is just so grown-up now. It's weird. She played Skip-Bo with the old ladies (me, Mom, Ira, Kalie), and she was quite good.

And it was wonderful to see Grandma again, now just a few months away from her 100th birthday! She was a sweet gem, as always. Here are the women who came before me and the women who came after me, all together (boo-hoo: we missed Kelly!).

Who'd have known I could give birth to a flamenco dancer?