Christmas Vacation

Christmas 2009 and new year 2010 were a whirlwind and spent surrounded by families. We flew into Bristol, VA, to spend Christmas with the Kim famiy on the 21st of December. While in Bristol, Tay got to spend a lot of time with her No-no (Halmuni) and Ebby (Harabuji) and even got familiar with Uncle Han. While there, her vocabulary and phrasing increased dramatically and she popped out with phrases like, "No-no house; cold outside" when we drove up to Halmuni's drive way.

While we were in Bristol, we also took a quick visit down to Ashville, NC, to visit Jesse and Megan who are getting hitched in May 2010 (and Jeff will be a groomsman). Tay had quite the visit with many tantrums about the cat they had and its small playhouse, which she claimed as hers...

Christmas eve, our family went to midnight Mass at St. Anne's (namely because our internal clocks still hadn't adjusted to EST) and Tay was surprisingly good, but not without frequent trips out of the sanctuary. Luckily, she fell asleep part way through (nap time) and she slept the rest of the Mass. I ran into Carmen before Mass so we got caught up a bit while the choir sang Lessons and Carols before the Mass began.

We linked up with Sarah and Jesse for lunch, too, which was nice; Sarah was actually due with the little Wingo on Christmas day, but she was late. Tay called her "baby" the entire time we were there, but we shared a great meal at Logan's.

Another exciting (albeit lowly attended) event was my 10-year high school reunion. It was scheduled for the day after Christmas, which actually was clever since many people were in town for Christmas, but still we had a pretty small showing. It was nice to see many of the people again since most of them I hadn't seen since graduation - correction - I hadn't seen any of them since graduation back in 1999. Amazing. I would say the funniest thing we talked about was how FB really cuts down on small talk since you can "FB-stalk" people and read up on how everyone is doing without really having to say anything...so you already know everything that most people make small-talk about...:) Ah well...such is social media. We did end up taking Tay to the event, but she passed out before she got a chance to meet anyone and stayed asleep the entire time we were there.

The day after the reunion, we made our way down to Florida (via plane) and checked into Tay's first Disney hotel! We stayed at the Pop Century resort; the room was a bit cozy and the bed arrangement was a bit difficult, but we managed and we got to visit Animal Kingdom (although it was surprisingly cold that day) and we LOVED our day at downtown Disney. Tay particularly enjoyed the fountains, but she didn't get wet (thankfully) since it was still a pretty chilly day. At Animal Kingdom, we did get to take the Safari ride, and Tay was enjoying it until the car movement put her to sleep. She was riding along and pointing out the animals she recognized until suddenly, she said, "Umma, giaff (giraff), ni-nite" and zonked out right after we saw the giraffs. I think Tay's favorite part of being at Disney, though, were the Mickey ice creams (definitely my favorite!). She definitely did not care to see any of the characters...still not so happy around people in costumes...I guess giant characters are pretty scary...

While at Disney, we had planned on linking up with Justin, Leslie and the girls for an outdoor movie in Orlando, but because the weather was so cold, we decided against it and we ended up driving down to Melbourne for a nice dinner and evening with the girls. Lucy and Tay were particularly amusing with their love-hate relationship and Polly and Evie were so sweet to Tay and all grown up!

After a few days at Disney, we drove over to Lakeland to ring in the new year with the rest of the Ryals family. The girls got to celebrate a second (or third or fourth) Christmas all together as cousins before the new year with presents and the weather even warmed up so they could have some fun running around outside in the neighborhood. New year's eve, we even got to shoot off some fireworks, which everyone found spectacular, and Polly won the big prize for most enthusiastic cheerer during the fireworks! We did our own version of a "count down" to the new year and sent the girls to bed. The adults hung about a bit, but as I watched TV and read a bit, I felt suddenly nauseous and had to quickly excuse myself. It was definitely a bout of food poisoning, and I was about to hop on a plane the next day...ugh. Anyhow, we made it back to the hotel (Tay still knocked out) and Jeff and I tried to commence packing. Well...Jeff made the call to delay our flight a bit and so we spent one more day in Lakeland (and had a nice dinner with JJ and Abs) and then made our way over to Melbourne to spend some more time with Granny and Pops and the girls.

We had another nice dinner at Justin and Leslie's and we had these amazing cheese blintzes that Granny made two mornings in a row! We also got to take Tay to the Brevard Zoo again (which is an excellent zoo, by the way) and Tay got to see many more giraffs close up, although she was none too excited about actually feeding them the crackers. She also got to feed some birds, a swan, and deer. I think her favorite was the swan because it stayed the farthest away...:) We got to relax and recover a bit before finally hopping on the long flight back to Korea. We left Melbourne around 3am, got to Orlando for our 6am flight and finally stepped back into our house in frozen Korea the next day around 7pm. That journey is just so long...but it was definitely worth it to see and spend so much time with all of our family.

Happy new year! Here's to an incredible 2010!