Our Hotel

Here are a few pics of our accomodations in San Antonio.

This is from level 3 looking down towards the lobby.


This is the lobby with players who are waiting for the buses to load for practice.


This is our living area (and Robbie playing Wii).


This is the kids' room complete with their pillowcases on the pillows, their blankets, and animals. It almost looks homey, eh? We try anyway. A week is a long time in a hotel room even when it is nice and spacious.

We are staying at the Marriott Rivercenter downtown. You can see the Alamo Bowl from our hotel room, and we have been told it will be faster to walk than drive there on game day. Our hotel is also connected to a mall which we ventured into today for the first time so I could get a soda. (So far everyplace we have been is a Pepsi place, and I am a Coke girl.) We can also walk out our hotel doors to the Riverwalk area. It is very pretty, but seems significantly cooler there tucked away from the sun and with a cool breeze off the water.

So far, we haven't done much adventuring other than the bowl sponsored activities going to Sea World and Knibbe Ranch yesterday (which I will post on in the near future). The problem is I have hard time convincing my children there are other fun things to do in San Antonio when I have to compete with this player/children's hospitality room in our hotel.

Our Christmas Card

First of all, let me say that our Christmas cards were not distributed completely this year because our computer crashed and died just before I did address labels. So, the only people who received cards are those who are in my "old-fashioned" address book or whose card to us happened to arrive while I still had our extra cards, stamps, etc. out so that I was promptly able to send off a card to you using what you had sent to us. So if you know us and did not receive a card from us, unfortunately you (or at least your most current address) is not in my address book. (Hint- you should send it to me)

Anyway, whether you received a card or not, below are pictures included in our card (a little bit bigger and in color) for better viewing. Enjoy!

A tree of favorites . . . favorite shoes that is--



Some of our favorite ornaments from our actual Christmas tree--

Merry Christmas

from us to you!



We woke up this morning with no tree, no snow, and without the comfort of our home, but we enjoyed Christmas morning together which is better than all of the rest of that combined. The kids each had presents for each other and did an amazing job of finding just the right thing - no exchanges necessary here, thank you.

Heading South for the Winter

. . . at least for a week.

We are in San Antonio, TX for the Alamo Bowl. We arrived yesterday after a van, plane, and bus ride to our hotel -the Marriot, Rivercenter- and have been having a good time ever since. The kids have played in our hotel room, played in the player/kid hospitality room, eaten in the staff/family hospitality room, taken a walk on the river walk, slept, and visited the training room that is set up in our hotel. I got to tag along for all of it, and they also tagged along with me to walk to Walgreen's to buy some food.

Today is Christmas Eve, and we are supposed to be heading to Sea World. It is supposed to rain today, so we will see if how that turns out. Drizzle- no worries. Down pour- doesn't sound like much fun. I will try to report back in.

We are looking forward to enjoying our family vacation - OSU Football style.

Don't Give Up

Seeing as I sent Christmas cards out and invited people to check out out blog, I guess I should write something, eh? I have not been very good about updating the blog although I really enjoy doing it when I make the time. Our computer is sick right now, so it makes it difficult to keep up. I hope you won't give up on us though and continue to check when you have a free moment.

Surely we will have some fun news to chare from our journey to San Antonio this coming week as we head south with our Cowboys to experience all that the Alamo Bowl has to offer. We will be there for 7 nights. The kids are looking forward to the trip. Rachel and Cole are especially excited about the airplane ride. They have flown three times before, but the most recent time was two years ago so they don't really remember.

Two and a half more days of school, packing, and time for fun before we get on that plane Thursday morning!

Merry Christmas, Everyone!

Naughty List

Seeing how bad I am at following through on things lately, I think I should definitely end up on Santa's naughty list. I promised a picture a day back in August and got MAYBE three days' worth in. Pretty, pretty sad! As I am working on Christmas cards and have reminded people they can check us out on our blogs, I figured I should at least check in. There is so much to cover, I am not even going to try to start; however I will share two things with you here today:

1) This past week I was looking for something I had posted on our blog a couple of years ago. In the process, I was mesmerized by the photos and stories I shared. I remembered all of them as happening, but most were not memories that I think of often. I absolutely LOVED it! Rachel and Cole were sitting with me for a while and had great fun seeing pics of them so little and hearing the stories that went along with them. Totally worth the time of doing . . . maybe even the boost I need to blog more regularly.

2) As most of the world who cares probably already knows, our OK State Cowboys are heading to the Alamo Bowl this year. We look forward to a fun time, new opportunities, and win #11!