Road Trip

The day after Christmas we woke up before the sun and headed to PA with Grandma, Grandpa, and Aunt Liane.  On the way we stopped at the Hagerstown Outlets for a couple of hours.  Our second stop was a visit with my Aunt Pat, my dad's twin sister.  After a few presents and some chatting we piled back in the car to visit my mom's side of the family.  Every year it gets harder to all get together as there are new additions to the family and as people move to different parts of the country.  I was excited to see everyone, especially since many of them had not met Kira yet.  It was a full (and crazy) house, but we had a great time and had a "Pap Style Dinner."  Pap was the name my cousins used for my grandfather on my mom's side and he was a great cook.  It was fun to relive the past by eating some of the food I used to eat as a kid.

[caption id="attachment_1319" align="aligncenter" width="200" caption="Kira and Uncle Karl (aka Willy Wonka)"][/caption]

(My Uncle Karl runs a candy factory and would take us on after hours tours.  We got to raid the piles of candy and take them home...sometimes good stuff like Godiva!  This time he brought us a bunch of Trader Joe's chocolates.)

[caption id="attachment_1320" align="aligncenter" width="200" caption="The Next Generation"][/caption]

[caption id="attachment_1321" align="aligncenter" width="200" caption="Pap always had twizzlers in his house and we used them as straws to drink pop!"][/caption]

[caption id="attachment_1322" align="aligncenter" width="300" caption="I thought this was a good place to sit down, only to discover they were talking about football!"][/caption]

[caption id="attachment_1323" align="aligncenter" width="300" caption="Kira really loves Aunt Liane!"][/caption]

[caption id="attachment_1324" align="aligncenter" width="300" caption="Playing with Bubbles"][/caption]

The entertainment for the evening was playing Super Mario Brothers on Wii and charades in the living room.  Things got even livelier when my uncle decided to serenade us with his version of Taylor Swift's "You Belong with Me."

[caption id="attachment_1325" align="aligncenter" width="300" caption="Wii"][/caption]