Smith Family

 This is our 3rd Christmas being away from family. Each year seems to get easier but I will always miss my parent's house full of chaos and cousins running everywhere. Nativity costumes, lots of food, talent shows and matching PJ's. This year we were still able to participate through Zoom because my parents decided to cancel the get together and do it completely virtually. It was nice being able to see everyone. We had a wonderful Christmas Eve and Christmas! First thing Christmas Eve they opened up their yearly ornaments to represent their year. Audrey got the Dodgers World Series trophy ornament. Brandon got a Fornite ornament, his very favorite video game that he would play 24/7 if we allowed him to. Melanie got a laptop because she has developed a love for writing. She will hop on the laptop and write her stories and sneak in writing instead of her typing lessons! Making cookies for Santa! We went with peanut butter with the chocolate kisses on top. Cinemark allows for peop...

There are a lot of words that could be used to describe 2020. Unpredictable, scary, death, political insanity, isolation, divisive, racial inequality, quarantine, masks etc. etc. It was really rough for us around June-October when we had no idea whether or not Elliott would have a job. Thankfully we were one of the lucky ones that didn't get furloughed. Financially speaking our biggest hit was that overtime was cut. We had big plans of paying off a lot of debt from law school and going on our first family trip to Disneyworld. Without that overtime we make about $2,000 less a month and it's quite a hit, but we are making it work. We canceled our Disneyworld trip and are living paycheck to paycheck but had Elliott been furloughed for an undermined amount of time I don't know what we would have done. I know there are many families in that situation and I wish we were in a position to offer some assistance instead of treading water. I feel very blessed and fortunate for where w...

 I'm so happy we were able to squeeze family photos in while we were in Arizona. I wish I would have had the wherewithal to make a couple different outfit choices. My mindset before flying was on packing everyone and everything else that goes into going on a trip so the outfits for pictures were kind of an afterthought. I think they turned out pretty well though and I'm happy we have them!

In September we started talking about flying to Arizona for Thanksgiving but were nervous because we didn't know what state the pademic would be in. Currently all arlines are allowing cancelations with no fees up to the date of the flight. We decided to book and figured if we didn't feel good about it we could always cancel and use the tickets next summer. My dad has accumulated an enormous amount of American Express points at work and offered to get us first class tickets using his points if that would make us feel more comfortable. As the middle of November started getting closer the pandemic kept getting worst. All news sources and the CDC were discouraging any travel which caused Pete and I to kind of panic. We had to really think and consider what would be best for us and if this was a risk we wanted to take.  Ultimately our reasoning came down to the fact that the airplane filtration system is really good, we would be at the very front of the plane and not mixed in amongs...