Utah for New Years, Part 3

This is the final part of our trip, I promise. I would not have spread it out over three posts, but I decided Brady's birthday deserved its own.

On New Years Day I woke up to the smell of Aebelskievers. These are Danish pancake puffs and a family favorite. My mom's ward (church group) got together for an activity at Jump on It, so she and the dads took the older kids. Becca and I stayed home a unwrapped caramels and prepped the strawberries for the chocolate fountain my mom was taking to our big Andrus family party.

My grandparents reserved their church for the afternoon/evening where we ate a fantastic 3-course meal, which was completed with the chocolate fountain and about 10 things for dipping. Cole and Brady thought it would be a great idea to eat their "Grandpa's Famous Chocolate Chip Cookies" from their skewers.

My cousins arranged the entertainment with a video for the kids and Minute to Win It games in the cultural hall for the adults. It was a lot of fun to get together with everyone again.

Becca and Scot left Sunday morning so Scot could get back to work. About an hour after that our trip took a turn for the worse. Brooke vomited twice, on my mom's light-colored carpet. Cory offered to stay home from church with her (isn't he so kind?). As it turns out, I was blessed for going because she vomited two more times and got it all over both of them. By then he was really wishing he were at church. All that evening she threw up and couldn't even keep liquids down. Our original plan was to return Tuesday, but Cory wanted to get home a day early to have a vacation from our vacation. I'm pretty inflexible when it comes to leaving a vacation early (imagine that), but I also had a sick baby as a good argument.

Brooke slept through the night and woke up feeling better Monday. We figured it was a 12-hour virus. Cory took Brady down to BYU and walked around campus while my mom and I went shopping.

Then we met at Coney's for lunch.

That's where we got the call that Tim and Leesa were for sure moving stuff into their new house that night. (It was a forclosure and their was a big question about getting the key even though they had closed on Friday.) So we got the kids home for a nap and then headed up to West Valley at 5pm. By the time we got their Cory wasn't feeling well. He still helped them move while feeling very nauseated, but when they wanted to take us all out for dinner at 8:30 Cory said we'd better hit the road instead. Fortunately Leesa returned some Tupperware to my mom and that's what Cory used to Puke in on the hour drive home. No fun.

He went to bed and was up the first part of the night. Apparently my mom got sick around 11:30 and they could hear each other in the neighboring bathrooms. Brady and I took a different room that night to be out of Cory's way. At 4:45 Brady woke us up because he was sick. We made it to the toilet just in time. I got him a bucket and he puked about 4 more times. Finally at 9:00 Tuesday morning we were all packed up and ready to leave. Cory had to work Wednesday, so sick or not, we had to make the 8-hour drive. Fortunately he was feeling much better then, and we figured we'd just have Brady to deal with. So we woke him up and went in to get Brooke to take out to the car. We walked in her room and were crushed to see (and smell) that she had puked all over her crib and every layer we had layed her on top of. So for the better part of an hour I used a toothbrush to scrub out throw-up in the bathtub. There were piles of comforters, sheets and towels in my mom's laundry room, and my poor mom was still so sick she couldn't even get out of bed. I started one load of laundry and before we left I got another one going. Then we just had to get the kids in the car before they made another mess. We were out of there just after 10am.

I'm happy to report we only had one puking incident the whole drive home. Well, I grabbed the bucket in time for Brady's first round, but later on it came out of nowhere and the poor guy was so embarrassed to have to walk into the convenience store with puke on his shirt and pants. I drove early on figuring I'd start feeling nauseous at some point. Fortunately I made it home feeling fine. And in the last 2 weeks I haven't felt sick once! I really was blessed for going to church. Haha. Actually, everyone else lost all their holiday weight, but I'm still working on mine the old fashioned way with diet and exercise.

Brady had told me a couple times that I'm his best friend. I decided I'd better document it for future use...