Christmas, Christmas Time is Here

This Christmas was a pretty quiet one. Since I went on vacation with my family for Thanksgiving, I stayed in Virginia for Christmas.It was a very quiet Christmas and I missed being home, but it was still nice and we had fun. My brother in law's family lives out here so we spent Christmas Eve night and Christmas night with them. Being with his family was much quieter than I am used to at Christmas so it was very different for me. Since we were just with them in the evenings, we were able to spend the rest of the time doing Bryner Christmas traditions. We had the traditional Bryner Christmas meal for lunch on Christmas Eve, then we acted out the Nativity(it was a pretty reverent rendition this year), and opened up the traditional Christmas Eve ornament for the Christmas tree. I was feeling just a little bit sad that I wasn't going to be able to go home for Christmas, so being able to do family traditions here helped make Christmas better for me.

Santa brought my niece a bike this year. She was SOOO excited when she saw it. 

I hope you all had a great Christmas!

"Vacation, all I ever wanted. Vacation, had to get away"

Maybe the title of this post got you singing and maybe it didn't. Either way, I am happy to tell you about the much-needed vacation I went on last week with my awesome family. It started for me when I flew to Utah for a couple of days. This was a very busy, fast part of the trip, but it was so fun to be back in Utah. As I flew in and stepped off the plane, I immediately felt like I was home. It was nice to feel that. No matter how far I am living from there, I love that it will always feel like home when I go back. Unfortunately I have no pictures from that portion of the trip. I got to see some good friends, and of course, my family while I was there. 

After my time in Utah, I spent the night driving with my parents, two brothers, and my aunt to California where we met up with (almost) the rest of my siblings and their families, and we spent Thanksgiving week there together. It was great to see everyone and I did not want to leave when the trip came to an end. We rented this great house that was just a few miles from Disneyland and not too far from the beach either. It had a pool and hot tub that we spent a lot of time in, and a great game room that let us play and watch movies together in(even though there were 15 of us).

Here are some pictures of the beach. It was foggy and cold while we were there, but still fun to play in the sand and water. And we went to this yummy restaurant called Ruby's Diner that had delicious burgers, fries, and shakes. We had to wait an hour to eat there, but it was worth it.  And they had gluten free buns! The good kind! For a person that usually has to get a burger without a bun, this was great. 

  

Me and my nephew Logan

One of the best parts of the trip was going to Disneyland. They had all their Christmas decorations put up and I loved how festive it felt walking around and being able to see and feel that the Holiday season has arrived, Disney style. I fell in love with Disneyland the first time I went when I was about 7 or so, and had just as much fun this time.

                           

                            

My nephew Logan scoping out the map to tell us where to go next

Back in the day when I went to Disneyland, California Adventure did not exist so it was a lot of fun to be able to go there as well. I loved Cars Land and thought it looked just like Radiator Springs. 

    

Beauty and the Beast, made out of legos. Legos! I can't imagine how long it took to make those!

I love this picture of my mom

Pretty little park near our rental house

I aspire to have a relationship like my parents someday. Aren't they so cute?

I enjoyed every minute of this vacation! Who's ready to start planning the next one? 

Sandy and the four day weekend

  When I first heard word that Hurricane Sandy was on its way to the east coast, I didn't really think anything of it because it wasn't expected to hit hard. At work on Friday, that all changed as meteorologists started saying it was going to hit land and that we needed to be prepared for it. Friday night, we made sure we had everything we needed at home to be ready for whatever might happen(especially no power) and went to the store to get what we needed. Saturday, we went to the corn maze as you saw on my last post. Sunday was kind of a gloomy day, but nothing happened as far as the hurricane. Sunday night, I got a call that I would not have to go to work on Monday. YES! Sometime Sunday night, it started raining, but the storm still hadn't hit. Monday morning, I went with my sister and niece to Target to grab a few last-minute supplies and this below is what we found as we passed the bread aisle! Apparently people were planning to live on bread when the hurricane hit.

Most of the day Monday, there was just a lot of rain and wind. The power stayed on all day which surprised us because we had expected it to be out all through the storm. It finally went out Monday night and stayed out until this morning. All the electric companies in the DC area were very well prepared for this storm and worked fast to give us back power. It was a blessing to know that while the storm raged(or not) outside, we were safe(and especially warm) inside. 

Despite the circumstances, it was so nice to have a couple of days off of work to just relax and hang out with my family here. We did puzzles and played games, built forts and watched tv, and we carved our pumpkins for Halloween.  My thoughts and prayers are with those who were strongly affected by this storm and are now experiencing the after-affects. As for us here in Virginia, the storm has calmed down and tomorrow we will be back to business as usual...

Oh, and Happy Halloween tomorrow!

Cox Farms

 Fall to me just isn't complete unless I have been to a corn maze. I did just that yesterday. We went to a big farm that had lots of food, slides for the kids, an awesome hayride, and of course, a corn maze. I will let the pictures speak for themselves.