About three weeks before Christmas Kevin and I decided to go home for Christmas but wanted to surprise a few people so kept that information off here and facebook. I’d been increasingly needing a grandchildren fix and since we sold the Tayana we felt that the splurge was doable. So a week before Christmas we packed our carry on bags, grabbed a cab to the airport in Mazatlan, and headed for the cold.

Karissa and Cadence met us at Sea-Tac with great big hugs. The drive home was full of songs as Cadence replayed her Christmas program for us and basically talked the entire way home. It had been a long time since we’ve heard that much chatter and made us smile to hear that little giggle again! The next morning Avery greeted me with ‘Hi Grandma’ like we had never left. I’m so grateful to Karissa and Josh for keeping us a part of their lives even while we are gone. We’ve had a great time, baking cookies, going to a Christmas light show, playing in the park, seeing a Christmas movie, picking out and wrapping presents, cuddling when allowed, and just hangin out. We even got to see my sister Cindy while baking as she was able to make it down from Canada for a few days. It’s been wonderful!

It has also been so much fun surprising people who thought we wouldn’t be back for a year.

First person was my friend Marilyn at SPIE. I recruited Brian (another friend at work) to set up a meeting with Marilyn so she would be sure to be around. Brian’s office is next to Marilyn’s so he walked in front of me and veered off to his office while I sat down at the small table in hers. She was so engrossed in what she was doing at her computer that it didn’t even register for a few seconds that anyone was sitting there. When she did realize there was someone there she glanced over and then had to do a double take to make sure it was me. Fun!

Next came our friends Eric, Amanda, Lydia and Parker. I sent a text message to Lydia to see if there was a time when all of them would be home so we could ‘call’ them to wish them Merry Christmas. After a number of messages back and forth trying to find a time that would work I finally had to confess to Lydia that we were in town and asked her to help us. We settled on picking her up from work to bring her home and she had told them we were going to call once she got home from work. We’d just have to sneak in behind her after she entered the house and she’d let the dogs out so they wouldn’t attack us. Unfortunately, the door was locked and Lydia didn’t have a key with her. That meant Eric had to get up to unlock the door so we ducked down behind Lydia (who is all of 5 feet or so which means Kevin and I really weren’t well hidden). Eric unlocked the door, glanced at Lydia as he turned around and then he too, did a double take. Eric was so taken aback that Lydia was jumping up and down because of the look on his face. Fun, fun!

Last on the list and why we had to keep everything a secret so long was Kevin’s folks, Thelma and Norman. We let Brian, Karen, and Krystle (Kevin’s brother, sister-in-law, and our niece) know we’d be to their house for Christmas dinner and planned a video chat session pretending that we were still in Mexico. Thelma, Norman, Brian and Karen were all at Thelma and Norman’s on their computer. Kevin and I along with Krystle and one of Kevin’s other brothers Mike, were at Brian and Karen’s on their computer. We started off the conversation with all the normal things; ‘Hi, how are you’, ‘Merry Christmas’, ‘How’s the weather’, etc. We moved on to Thelma seeing a light in the background and commenting on the sun. At one point we had Krystle walk by us and Thelma said ‘What’s Krystle doing there’ but me convincing her it was just someone on the beach that looked like her. Then Mike walked past and Thelma started really questioning what was going on but still wasn’t quite sure what was happening until Brian asked me to check the turkey at which point she started laughing and crying. Poor Norman never really caught on even after Karen disconnected. The way it turned out it was probably more fun for us then them, but I think they were all good with it once we actually gave them hugs! Fun, fun, fun!