Hope You Had Yourself a Merry Little Christmas!

Merry Christmas from the Carswell crew! So what!?! Yeah, I know it's past Christmas, almost New Years, but I'm behind and I'm catching up! We hope yours was great...ours was! We had a festive time hanging out and chilling with family and friends. There were some fun times and events during the holidays that I should have posted and filled everybody in on, but so much else has happened since then that I can hardly keep up and remember it all. All the fun memories are in my heart, hahaha cheesy! "Santa" came and visited everyone in our house! Hope you were nice and not naughty so he stopped at your house too! CC got a electric guitar, so much for peace and quiet around my house! Hahaha. KC, little miss diva, was excited about a new cellphone, and both kiddos loved their new Ipod touches. We all were excited about our gifts, but the most important gift of this season and seasons past is the birth of Jesus...don't forget that!

O Christmas Tree...

It finally happened...the Carswell family, aka Griswold family, found, bought and decorated a tree! Yes, Dec. 12th, later than usual, but nevertheless it was up and finished! Tree #1 shown here out of the 4 that eventually made it into the home before the 25th. Ahhh, one accomplishment down...too many to go!

NYC Girls Only!

At the last minute, I decided to take take a trip to NYC with my Mom, sister, and BFF. I decided to take this little trip while I was out of town racing and had already been gone from home for over 2 weeks between our Mexico trip and the trip to race. So, I got back from the Snowball Derby early Monday morning then flew out Tuesday morning...yeah I'm crazy, just in case you didn't already know! :) We had a fabulous trip! Soooo fun! And yes, I'm glad I decided to "just do it" and not worry that I had no Christmas tree, no presents bought...basically totally unprepared for Christmas, which was only 14 days away by the time I decided to finally come home!

On the Go

So yeah I did come back from Mexico...for 1 day! hahaha. We were off again, this time just me and Jake, to Pensacola, FL for the 41st annual Snowball Derby. This is a huge race among teams and fans. It was our 1st year attempting this feat...long story and long trip short...we qualified in on speed out of 60 cars, started the race on Sunday with 41 cars in the field, finished the Snowball's 300 lap race 15th and all in one piece. The kids did come down and meet us, thanks to Chris and Jen, on Friday. We all enjoyed the weekend festivities together, but we were exhausted at 2:30 Monday morning when we finally pulled the motorhome back into town. School came early on Monday! We are recovering from 5 days of racing, Jake especially, and now on to the next thing. OH WHAT?!? Christmas is soon??? Wow, I don't have the 1st decoration, tree, nothing up at our house! I better get my act together or Christmas will come and leave me behind! Today will not be the day though...I'm heading out of town! See you later!

Hola!

We are back from our Mexican vacation and had a BLAST! Mom and Dad had a relaxing 2 weeks at The Four Seasons Punta Mita, and me, Jake, our kids, Hollie, Pete are their girls all flew in and chilled for 9 days. The weather could not have been more perfect...HOT, sunny, 90 degrees...absolutely wonderful!

There seems to always be celebrities or some one famous on our trips, and this one was the same. Jake saw Lars, the drummer from Metallica, after we had just been been a day or so. He and his family seemed to be right by us everyday at the beach or the pool. They were very nice and friendly. His girlfriend is an actress and in one of Jake's favorite movies, Gladiator. Even though it embarrassed Jake for Mom to do it, she had to get Lars' picture before our trip was over. I'm surprised Jake didn't want one with Lars' girlfriend! hahaha.

If we weren't by the infinity edge pool that overlooked the Pacific, we were out on the beach in one of these "casitas", as Jake called them. I'm not even sure what they were suppose to be called, but Jake named them the 1st day and it stuck with us the whole time. We layed in the sun, admiring the ocean, and looking for whales in between reading or looking through our gossip magazines. We saw whales almost everyday at some point. We had never seen them before, so that was neat. We also watched turtles hatch on the shore. Now that was an experience! Very cool and entertaining watching those little heads pop out of the sand then wiggle out and start making their way toward the water. We even saw a sea lion swimming close to the shore one afternoon.

We had a photographer come to the resort and take our annual Hunt family pictures. Surprisingly, they turned out wonderful! There's so many good ones we can't decide what to use on our Christmas card this year. Good problem to have! I'm sure you'll be seeing some of them soon. For now these are just some snapshots we got...trying to relive those warm days...

We hope everyone had a wonderful Thanksgiving...now it's on to Christmas...well, we have another trip this week then it'll be time...more later...