Porter Christmas Activities

This Christmas vacation will forever go down as the "sick year" but luckily we were able to have a lot of fun before the plagues set in!

We had a Family Home Evening awards ceremony put on by Fit Felicia and Ripped Ryan. Scott and Kathryn got all of our butts in gear in the early fall by setting a goal that between all of the adults doing push-ups, sit-ups, and lunges we should push for a group goal of hitting 100,000 reps before Christmas. After the first couple of weeks when we were still feeling totally pumped we got cocky and amped up the reps to 130,000 and added a goal for a collective total of cardio minutes. Then somewhere in the middle we all faltered and as time continued it looked less and less likely that we would achieve the goal, then BOOM! We pulled through in the last couple of weeks like Spartans for the win!

Also brought to us by Kathryn and Scott was our M&M taste test. Did you know they make candy corn flavored M&M's? Ew.

Trying to get the spirit of giving instead of the spirit of getting into our kids heads, we helped them donate some money to the bell ringer and had them help us pick out toys to give to a refugee family. They thought putting the money into the bucket was cool, but picking out the toys for other kids still kind of missed the mark. One of these years it will stick though, right?!

Wrapping presents for the refugees.

I was hoping that Cameron would possibly get something out of delivering them to the refugee family, but on the way there he lost his lunch, which I'm sure poor Kathryn and Scott will not soon forget since they were sitting in the back of the van with the him! Needless to say poor Cameron wasn't really in the spirit of giving at that point. 

My favorite outing was going to the Hale Center Theatre to see A Christmas Carole. I was skeptical when we first walked in because of how small the stage area is and I had never been to a play in such an intimate setting, plus I was at the peak of my head cold and wanted to cut my sinus passageways out of my face, but it ended up being an extremely well put-together performance. The placement of certain musical numbers was really moving. I'll never be able to listen to "God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen" the same. The way it was sung and arranged brought new light to the lyrics and really put the emphasis on Scrooge's repentance process. The guilt he felt, the humility he felt thinking about Christ as a little baby born to save the world, and the gratitude he felt that because of Jesus Christ he could find peace and forgiveness. I would definitely recommend it and we'll probably go again next year.

Mom and Dad Porter sent us adults to the play (they had seen it the previous week) and they stayed home to get in some good grandkid time.

That night we all went on a trolley ride through the lights at Thanksgiving Point.

The next day was Christmas Eve and finally on Christmas Day I woke up feeling like my cold was on the mend. I love that day in a cold cycle. It's the light at the end of the tunnel (or it should be). Sadly, Kathryn and Josh woke up with a stomach bug that progressed throughout the day until they were pretty much bed ridden. And it was allll down hill from there. The kids and adults started dropping like flies each day to either the stomach bug or the flu. Every morning we'd surface for breakfast and wonder, "Okay, who'd it hit??" 

Still, the able bodied carried on. ,

This spritely young fellow had a birthday. Unfortunately, we couldn't go to the Provo Rec Center pool as planned because we thought we'd contaminate the entire building, but we did send him and the boys out to a movie. Half of the adults went to the temple that morning as well to do family sealings.

We tried to make the most of the time we had left before people started heading home and before any more of us got hit with the sicknesses. We broke in our new Ticket to Ride Europe game and got in some Settlers and Monopoly Deal.

We had a day when we went shooting too. We split into two groups and had a competition. The first group went while the others stayed home with the kids and then we switched. 

Can I just say that I was feeling pretty proud of myself at the end? I had been shooting once before and it kind of gave me the heebie jeebies because I'm just not naturally comfortable with guns. We own one now though, so I really want to feel confident about knowing the ins-and-outs. Even though I know most of it was beginner's luck, I was pretty proud of my target which landed me in third place (right behind Kimber and Lindsey--a girls for the win sweep!).

Bullseye!

Jayce smoked it in the practice round though!

 Then we had a fort day with the kids to give them more variety since it was too cold to do anything outside and we were too sick to go somewhere else. I'm pretty sure it earned Kathryn and Scott Aunt and Uncle of the day because the kids were totally loving running around inside and outside the fort trying to get away from/attack the "snake" they brought to life.

We had a little bit of a Wii boxing tournament which left me unbelievably sore in my "Wii muscles."

Trying to celebrate being sickness survivors, although several of us went down in the few days after this shot. Dun, dun, dunnnnnn!

I thought I had escaped the other illnesses besides the cold I had at the beginning, but I got hit with the stomach bug New Year's Eve (we had come home the day before) and then my cold that I thought I was almost over spiraled into a sinus infection which plagued me the next several days. Cameron got the stomach bug with me, but Jayce was able to just skim the surface of the flu. Jessica was the only one to make it out completely unscathed, so we're going to sell her DNA to the highest bidder so that it can be used to create the inoculation that will save man kind when the zombie apocalypse happens.