Christmas in Montana

The winter is flying by! The family spent a lovely 9 days in Montana over Christmas, with presents and food and normal sorts of holiday cheer. Some developments:

• Astronomy! Rockets are the new cars! (Well, not quite.) We spend hours each day counting down from 10 to 1 and blasting off various rockets. Plus, he loves watching Youtube videos of Space Shuttle liftoffs, to the point that now, when we count down, he says "3... 2... 1... Ignition... and Liftoff! of the Space Shuttle Atlantis... [indecipherable]... space station! [indecipherable]... tomorrow!"

• He opened a cowboy wallet, and discovered two dollars. A few presents later, he opened a Lightning McQueen wallet, found it was empty, announced "No money," and tossed it aside. Apparently, it starts early.

• We finally got a portable DVD player up and running. The difference of flying with and without a DVD player is amazing... on the way back, we got stuck in Denver for many hours, and watched most of Cars, Finding Nemo and The Incredibles between laps up and down the terminal halls.
  
  

Playing guitar with Daddy:

And arriving at the airport in Great Falls, Montana. Note that we arrived quite a bit past bedtime, and that SA slept exactly ZERO hours on the two flights.


A bit of fancy dining out:



A white Christmas would be nice, but a brown one allows for more soccer:

Finally, the airport goodbye. After we left Great Falls, we spent lots of time in planes and airports before getting home at a very late hour.