Christmas Morning 2009

Christmas Morning got off to a lovely, exciting and joyous start! My kids are so awesome! They always come and get us in the morning and wait for us to get the cameras all ready before they begin their raid of the Christmas tree! Don't get me wrong, they love Christmas morning and become extremely excited about this morning ritual, but they let us have a minute to prepare, which I appreciate. Perhaps this is because we don't do "Santa" at our house, If you are interested in our views on Santa, look here. But I love our Christmas mornings and I think that we have a wonderful family celebration of the birth of our Lord Jesus Christ.

And so, after the mad dash down the stairs, the present-opening began!

*Just a note here: Matt kept telling me not to worry about the wrapping paper, we'd pick it up at the end, and I acquiesed. But it is totally bothering me in all these pictures!


Stockings were almost forgotten with all of the hullabaloo with the gifts:

Isaac first opened a gift from his teachers, and I was proud of him for being so enthusiastic about this gift.

I was tempted to comb Victoria's hair, but I decided that you have to see the awesomeness that is her hair first thing in the morning!

Daphne has been asking for Webkinz for the longest time... I have resisted as I get annoyed with this type of technological video game entrapment for children, but I had been reassured by many friends that they are relatively harmless, so here we go!

Every year, we give the children an ornament that is engraved with each child's name and the year. This year, because of our amazing summer adventures, we decided to buy the children's ornaments at the offical Kathe Wolfhart Christmas Store in Rothenburg Ob Der Tauber. They are handcrafted, ceramic ornaments. Instead of an engraving, I just wrote each child's name on the bottom with a thin sharpie!

Here is Isaac opening his:

And next, can I get a drumroll, please?....Isaac got to open my gift to Matt and Isaac together:

If you can't see what that is, it is a PS3. Also known as a Playstation 3. For over a year now, I have watched my husband salivating over this magnificent piece of technology and all it's bells and whistles. And finally, I gave in. I was too anxious to see the joy on Isaac's face.

And an immediate hug afterward!

And Daphne has been asking for this styling head for quite some time. Apparently the whole idea of this toy creeps Matt out. I guess it's a girl thing. I remember them from my childhood, so maybe I don't get it. Daphne was thrilled, nonetheless.

After all the gifts and stockings, we had a yummy breakfast of cinnamon rolls together. And after that, we began the mad dash of trying to finish our preparations for our 24 hour drive to Texas to see my family! I had packed all the clothes and toiletries and gifts the night before, but I still needed to prepare and pack food for the road and finish putting together the kids' backpacks of goodies. Matt loaded several movies onto the laptop and onto his phone to help keep them occupied while I scrambled around with other preparations. He went and filled the cooler with ice while I made sandwiches. And finally, around 1 pm, we were ready to go!

The idea was to leave around Tori's naptime so that she would sleep for the first leg of the trip. It took her about an hour, but after that, Tori, Isaac, Daphne and I fell asleep! Yay!

Tori woke up after 45 minutes. Boo!
So we drove on. and on. And they were pretty cheerful:

I even got a picture of the beautiful Utah landscape on our way down. Driving around Europe made us realize how much beauty we have right around our home and we don't even take advantage of much of it.

So, after we had been driving for three hours, we stopped for gas and a bathroom break. It was at this point that the van started.... hmmm... how shall we say?.... surging. The engine would make this very strange sound and give a sort of lurching movement. Something neither Matt or I had ever experienced in a vehicle before. We had just pulled back onto the freeway and were near the thriving metropolis (snort) that is Green River, Utah.
What to do?!?

We started pulling off the freeway and driving into Green River while calling Matt's Dad on the phone. Matt's Dad, Calvin, who is literally a rocket scientist. And a calculus teacher and a mechanic/ fix-anything kind of guy....

We started looking for a hotel in Green River, thinking that surely, since it was now 5:30 on Christmas night, we would have to wait until morning to get it checked. We stopped at a few hotels and Matt asked if there was an auto shop anywhere nearby. We decided to drive down into the "town" a bit to see if we could find one. And we did, but none of them would be open until Monday! A whole weekend in Green River?! This was unacceptable...

We kept looking around and evetually found an all-night truck stop with a little mechanic shop place. The guys there let us drive in and tried to help us figure out our problem. They were so nice and helpful, but a little odd. They seemed much more concerned with getting our check engine light turned off than with the surging, shimmying that had actually caused it to light up...

So after amuch speculation and disconnecting the battery, we pulled out of the truck stop with the check engine light off and no surging or shimmying! Hooray! We pulled back onto the freeway and headed toward Texas! We thought we better call Matt's parents and tell them our good news. Calvin heard our story and said (and I paraphrase), "Well, if you want to head on, you can, but that doesn't mean that your van is in the clear. Cars have a trigger system in place, a certain amount of time you can drive them before it officially "registers" a problem and the check engine light comes back on. That could be forty miles or it could be 300. All you've done is reset the system... You might be fine, but you also might end up right back in the same situation once the trigger goes off again...."

After matt relayed all of this information to me, I realized we weren't in the clear. Something that had been whispering in the back of my mind since we had gotten back on the freeway. And we realized that we had a decision to make. I kept praying that God would help us to know what to do, to have wisdom, that He would protect our family from danger. And we decided to drive to Moab and see how the car was doing. But then we pulled over....

I prayed and cried. As I thought about driving to Texas all I could feel was fear. We would have hundreds of miles of Nothing ahead of us...

I saw a vision of our family on the side of the road in the middle of nowhere, snow all around, no heater, no way to get to a hotel...

But how could we change our plans now? We'd miss seeing my family again. We were on our way! We felt very similarly to when we were leaving Germany to return home, Matt and I had a discussion about how wonderful it would be if we could just teleport. We wanted to be home, we just didn't want to deal with getting there.

When we thought about returning home, however, we felt more peaceful. It seemed to me that if we had made it this far before the trigger went off and the van had trouble. It seemed we had a much better chance of making it home. Or at least back to the I-15 corridor where there is civilization! At least if we made it back to the valley we could find somewhere to stay and a shop that might be open the next day...

And so, with tears streaming down my cheeks, we turned around and headed for home. Isaac and Daphne started crying and yelling- they couldn't understand that we were doing the best we could. And they were SO disappointed. I was disappointed.

It wasn't snowing, but the wind was blowing the snow on the ground all around and we still had to make it through Spanish Fork Canyon. Of course after we called Matt's parents, Marsha informed us that more people die in that pass every year than anywhere else in Utah or something... So that helped with the tension.

And sure enough about an hour or so into our return trip, the shimmying and surging began again. It became very worrisome as we drove through the canyon... My sweet Matthew looked almost as tense as the night I nearly gave birth to Daphne on the bathroom floor! :)

But I just prayed and prayed and we just kept going and going. The surging and clunking got more and more pronounced the further we drove. And eventually, around 11:30 pm ( I think) we arrived back in our garage. It was rather anti-climactic to pull back into our home after all that effort and heart-ache. But more than any of that, we were relieved and so very grateful to our Amazing Lord for helping our family to return home safely.

We got out of the car and the engine reeked of an intense burning smell and Matt and I both felt that God had provided for us in a miraculous way that night... I know it might seem small to many of you, but we knew we had been led out of danger that night. Although we were intensely disappointed to miss out on our long-awaited trip to Texas, we were most of all thankful to be safe and home.

So, I can definitely think of better Christmas Days in my life, but it will certainly be memorable. And we will see our family soon. Summer can't come too soon for the Hunter Family!

We'll be seeing you!