The holidays in Haines are wonderful with lights and parades, Santa pictures and cookie competitions.  Mrs Claus storytime at the library, Joie loves that one.  We stayed for a few of these things but were blessed to go down south to spend Christmas with family and get a break from all the snow up here.

We left Tues Dec. 15th after Zach got off work. Packing and cleaning went pretty smoothly and we left the house relaxed and without that 'I forgot something' feeling. That almost never happens right? I even did all my dirty laundry that day at the laundrymat so I could come home to all things clean and done.  After Zach got off we left for the ferry terminal.  A 5 hour ferry ride at night didn't seem so bad. The kids had barely napped during the day, we figured all of us would get to sleep.  Wrong!  They screamed and ran around the ferry waking all the other passengers up. Stairs was the favorite and kids crawling up and down those dirty things on a boat was hard for me to handle.  I need clean as we only bath once a week. The thought of showers down south daily gave me peace.  I took them with me to visiting teach some sisters from our branch in the cafeteria. That led to salt and pepper everywhere and 3 days later there were still sugar packets stashed in Joie's jean pockets. We were planning on eating dinner in the theatre and then sleeping but we ended up making our way to the solarium picking up pieces of clothes and shoes left by the kids along the way.  It was cold up there on the deck at night, a bit of snow coming down too.  They learned quick, well, after 2 hours, that if they wanted to go inside they needed to calm down.  The last 2 hours of the ferry ride we all slept, inside.  We were woken up by lights outside the boat and we realized we had docked in Juneau. Slowly waking up Zach noticed we weren't moving and everyone was gone.  Quickly we gathered all our stuff and sleepy kids and got to our car on the bottom level.  Molly was nice enough to get us a hotel room to stay in that night. Even though we had to sleep in our sleeping bags on the beds it was WAY better then sleeping in the crampy back of the 4Runner and we got a decient nights rest considering we went to bed round 1 or 2am.  Our flight left the next day in the evening so we had the day in Juneau.  We went to Costco and Walmart of course and drove around a bit.  Thought we'd go to McDonalds for a cheap breakfast, that had totally changed. We paid 17 bucks for a few sandwiches and stuff, 3 bucks for a crappy hot cocoa!  I brought sandwiches and we ate those the rest of the day.  We were invited to Pres. Huntsman's, a member of our stake presidency, for dinner that evening.  Him and his wife were so gracious and let us park our car at their home while we were gone.  After dinner we repacked our bags for airplane standards and rushed to the airport.  Thank goodness for small airports we made it on in time but we were the last ones on and our seats were in the back of the plane.  After hitting alot of people with our bags and some angry stewardesses we were settled in for the 3 hour flight.  The back of the plane seemed to be where all the young kids were and we had a lil girl about Fox's age sitting next to us.  The flight down wasn't so bad. Fox and Opal cried and stared at eachother till they fell asleep.  We got in late and Molly and Chet picked us up and took us to Molly and Frank's place. Sleep there was nice. Showers even better.