Life is funny sometimes. You don't appreciate good health till you've been mired in sickness. You don't crave rest till you've been swamped in busyness. You don't love home till you've been away from it.

Well, that last one is relative. I always love home. 🙂

The point is, the hard parts in life make the good ones all the more wonderful.

This is a very long and winding post about how that has looked for us this past month, and it might not be interesting to anyone but my mom and dad, but here goes. 🙂 The trip, the sick, and the holiday -- that's how I sorted out my notes. And the title will make sense eventually, I promise.

To make it make sense though, I have to go back a ways . . . all the way back to December 24th and the beginning of some hard things that made the good things at the end all the more appreciated.

Here we are, Christmas Eve 2023.

Not really wishing for adventure but about to go on one nonetheless. About to take flight from Oregon to Missouri to celebrate Christmas with the rest of the Baers. We were somewhat trepidatious about the whole thing, especially since our last experience flying with all three boys was not just the best one, but our tickets were bought, and our massive suitcase was packed, and off we went.

We've gotten pretty lucky flying with kids, I'd say. This was Alec's eighth or ninth flight, and in all that traveling we'd never had a missed or delayed flight. We are also pretty picky about our flight times and don't usually go for the late-night-arrival stuff, but we didn't have many options this go-around. So all that said . . .

The first leg of our journey went fine. Here's Alec riding at the very front of the shuttle bus. The driver seemed to get a kick out of his commentary. 🙂

We met up with Ian and Abby, who happened to be on our flight, and we boarded the plane, Eric and Sebastian on one side, Alec and Emmett and I on the other side, with strangers in both window seats. We usually try to make sure the boys can sit together so they can share the iPad, but we couldn't snag three seats together this flight. Here's Sebastian listening to Stinky and Dirty instead of watching it. 🙂

Eric and I eventually managed to sit together for a good chunk of that flight after finally convincing Sebastian that if he would just sit by a not-so-scary stranger he could watch the iPad with Alec. We haven't sat together on a plane for who knows how long! We were off to a great start.

Enter: Denver International Airport.

What was supposed to be a layover of an hour and a half was immediately extended by an hour, we saw upon arriving to our gate. There was general annoyance. "I'm okay with that, just so that's all it actually is." I said.

That was not all it actually was. We were originally supposed to board our last flight at 8:30pm, which was then extended to 9:30pm. 9:30pm rolled around, and with it bad news. Our flight had been delayed another three hours. We had already been dreading the getting-to-our-room-at-1am-with-three-little-boys, but now it was much worse than that.

Thank goodness we had Ian and Abby with us. They helped entertain and corral our boys for the entire five-ish hours we were stuck in the airport. So did Spot-It, crayons, If You Give a Mouse a Cookie, and a bunch of little construction vehicles that I'd packed for my little machine boys. Those machines came in handy so many times on this trip.

We finally boarded our plane a little after midnight, and I was very relieved to hear the pilot saying the flight would be just a little over an hour, instead of the two-and-a-half-hour flight it was supposed to be.

It must've been about 1:30am when we arrived at the Kansas City airport, but our troubles weren't over. Because it was so late, our rental car agency was closed, and we couldn't get our car. Ian's had someone coming to pick them up, and we tried to send word that we would potentially need a bigger vehicle that would fit all of us, but somewhere along the line that message got lost. We ended up stealing Ian and Abby's ride while they waited for another ride. Thanks again, guys.

We didn't get to the Big House till 3:30am, and till we got everyone settled into bed and collapsed in bed ourselves, it was 4:30am. Merry Christmas to us. 🙂 Not. We were just so glad to finally be somewhere though!

I'm happy to say that the rest of our time in Missouri wasn't nearly as eventful, not until we got to Branson anyway. I'll get to that though. In the meantime, we spent a really nice few days with all of Eric's family, celebrating Christmas and doing a bit of sightseeing and mostly just hanging out and eating food.

Here's two happy little boys with their new hats from Grandpa.

And here's three happy little boys with their new pjs from me. Here's the Big House, where we all stayed.And here's three funny little boys watching a video to keep them from running all over creation while we got our rental car. For some reason this is one of my favorite pictures from the whole trip. 🙂 They're so cute all in a row. And look at Alec with his sketchpad. He carried that thing everywhere in case he saw something he wanted to draw. We all went to Union Station, with its neat model train setup.Eric found a washerwoman out in the snow. Pillowcases work great as laundry bags, if you didn't know. 🙂Little cousins were everywhere. 🙂Eric and I found the neatest wall of books.

We all went to a coffee shop.And then, it was adios to the Big House and the Baers. Onward to the Roths and Branson.When the Baer festivities were over, we got up early and drove a little over three hours to have lunch with my brother and his family, then another hour on down to Branson for the night. We'd had a lot of fun in Branson on another trip that we took a few years ago, and we wanted to try to recreate that a little bit. We booked our same motel with the huge water slide, and we planned swimming and supper around when the best time to go to the fire-and-water show at Branson Landing would be.

But.

The water slide was closed for maintenance.

Shucks.

We were not happy. The water slide was a huge part of why we'd come to Branson in the first place. The ladies at the front desk told Eric about a different motel with a water park that put their water slide to shame. Going on a wild goose chase after a water slide was not what we felt like doing at 5pm, but we'd been talking about going on the water slide long before we even got on that first plane, and we weren't about to give up just yet. (I say "we." That should read "Eric.") We went to the other motel, and the water park tickets were absolutely atrocious, and they wouldn't give us a discount even though the day was almost over. We decided to just bite the bullet, but when Eric went back in to buy the tickets, the lady at the counter handed him four wristbands and said, "I think you forgot your bands." Bless her sweet heart, she let us in for free.

The ladies at the other motel weren't kidding when they said this one put theirs to shame. It was massive. Overwhelmingly so. So many pools and sections and slides and hot tubs. The boys were excited; I was just ready to go back to the room. But we found a spot to stash our stuff, and we found a pool that was shallow enough for Emmett to enjoy, and we settled in.

Next thing you know, we turned around to see one of our boys puking everywhere.

Oh dear.

Said boy and baby and I ended up hanging out in a lukewarm hot tub, biding time while Eric and the other boy rode a few of the water slides. So it wasn't all in vain, but it kind of felt like everything kept going wrong, minus those lovely free tickets of course.

Then we went to "the shooting water" as the boys call it. Branson Landing. We went to the eight o'clock show so that there'd be three songs instead of just one. After the water park fiasco, the shooting water seemed like an automatic good time. We'd been there multiple times before, and it was always fun and straightforward.

What do you know, there were the lights, and there was the music, and there was the shooting water . . . but the best part . . . the fire? Well, of all unfortunate things, the fire wasn't working. We somewhat disappointedly listened to two songs, hoping maybe there just wasn't fire on those, but a third song never played. Or maybe we missed it at the beginning, but whatever the case, we heard two songs, and there was no fire. 🙁 That was kind of sad.

Don't miss the hilarious addition to our selfie. Oh, Emmett.Branson felt like a bust, honestly. The water slide was kind of a fail; the shooting water was kind of a fail. But our room was wonderful. And so was our Applebee's supper. And we did have fun just being together. There's no other people I'd rather have a disappointing time with. 🙂 But maybe next time we're itching to go to Branson we'll just content ourselves with a visit to the Kroc Center and supper at Applebee's. 🙂

The next morning it was finally time to go home. Thankfully the trip home wasn't nearly so eventful as the trip there.

And then the sickness hit . . . Emmett brought pink eye home from Missouri, and everyone but Eric ended up getting it. Pink eye was reserved for the women and children I guess; Eric got hit with much worse. He was SO sick for days. The boys kind of took turns with pink eye and fever. One would have one while the others had the other; then they'd switch around or have both at once.

At one point I told Eric that my January calendar so far was just a running commentary of who had pink eye and fevers and coughing. Poor Emmett got a bright red spot on his cheek from swiping his runny nose with his sleeve all day long.

The couch took up residence in the kitchen, occupied by whoever happened to be most afflicted at the moment. Or, as in the case below, by whoever wanted to be watching videos with the one who was most afflicted. 🙂

And goodness, the SLEEP. Don't even get me started on the sleep. This definitely wasn't our first rodeo with tripping and parenting. We knew that a trip like this almost always meant disrupted sleep schedules and children waking way more than they usually do, but it certainly felt like overkill this time. The entire time we were in Missouri all three of our boys were up and down all night, and even splitting that up between two adults still meant lots of getting up for both of us. It wasn't much better when we got home. At least in Missouri I had Eric for backup, but for the first few days back at home he was too sick to be any help. So there I was in the middle of the night, playing whack-a-mole with my two youngest. One would get up, and when I came out from resettling that one, the other one would get up. There was one night where I was up six times in the space of an hour, and another morning when I woke up to Sebastian sprawled out beside me in bed. I don't remember that ever happening before. I had no idea when he'd appeared there or why he'd decided to just get in bed instead of waking me up. Maybe he tried. 🙂 Anyway, pretty soon it'd been multiple days of me seeing almost every hour on the clock almost every night.

I actually felt great most of that time. I initially didn't get sick other than pink eye thankfully, and I can usually exist pretty well on low sleep for as long as I'm not getting any. But give me a good night, and I start to crash. So when everyone else was coming to the end of the sickness and the pink eye, and I finally got some better sleep, I came down with a terrible sore throat. I could hardly swallow for days.

So that was all the week after New Year's Day, and Alec's Christmas break was supposed to end on that Wednesday, but he ended up staying home all week. This picture kind of sums up how that entire week felt.

The next week was a little better. Those of us who had places to be and people to see (Eric and Alec) conveniently got well, and the rest of us soldiered on through more sickness. The pink eye just wouldn't leave Emmett and Sebastian alone, and my sore throat had hit by then. We were halfway back to normal, but it was really beginning to drag. Counting both travel and sickness, it'd been a doozy of a three weeks.

I didn't know it then, but Eric bringing home these tulips on the night of Friday the 12th signaled the end of the doozy and the beginning of the holiday. 🙂 Martin Luther King Jr. Day was the following Monday, and what really ushered in the holiday began that night.

That night the snow and ice came, and it felt like we could begin to breathe again. Almost everyone was well, apart from my sore throat and Sebastian's pink eye. We were all together, iced in, with nowhere to go and nowhere to be and no schedule to keep, and it was just AMAZING. It felt like just what we needed.

Eric doesn't take many days off work, and when he does we are usually busy with either traveling or family things. To have this much time off and to have almost everyone well and to be able to just be home together was such a huge gift, especially since it felt like it didn't end. There was no school, no church, no work for days. Saturday and Sunday came and went, but Monday and Tuesday and EVEN WEDNESDAY were right behind them, and both Eric and Alec were home almost that whole time. It was just absolutely wonderful. I didn't want it to end, and you'd better believe I kept thanking God for giving it to us.

Christmas didn't feel like a holiday. (Too much traveling -- I've never before walked through an airport at 3am on Christmas morning saying "Merry Christmas" to people, and I hope to never again.) New Year's Day didn't feel like a holiday. (Too much sickness -- I don't think I've ever spent a New Year's Day entirely at home, and it didn't feel like the beginning to a new year in the slightest.) The first holiday to actually feel like a holiday was, of all things, Martin Luther King Jr. Day.

Eric and I were talking about it that Monday, and we were like, "Why have we never celebrated this holiday before? This is a great holiday!" 🙂

At that point we still hadn't managed to celebrate Christmas with my family because of all our traveling and then sickness, and I joked to my mom that by the time I gave them their gifts they wouldn't be Christmas gifts anymore, and we'd have to say "Merry Martin Luther King Jr.-mas." (And now you know where the blog title came from.)

Merry Martin Luther King Jr.-mas. What a lovely holiday. Here's how we spent it.

Snow cream.

Reading. Tess of the D'Urbervilles for Eric, Far from the Madding Crowd for me. Thomas Hardy is having a comeback in our house, it seems. 🙂

Eating pizza with family and finally getting to give away some gifts I was so excited about (read my last blog post if you're curious what those were).

Troubleshooting.

PSA to any other wives out there who are smart enough to store emergency water in the garage but not smart enough to realize it might actually be an emergency when it's icy outside and there's suddenly no water: Your pipes might be frozen, and your husband probably wants to be woken up. Here I am merrily going out to collect all my water from the garage instead of waking Eric up.

Wrong move, but thankfully there were no burst pipes, and it was just a matter of warming the pump house back up. We really were blessed this time around. We didn't lose power, and we only lost our water for a couple of hours. Eric actually found an unrelated sewer leak under the house while he was looking for the source of the water outage, and I told him maybe God let our water go out just so he'd find that leak.

But back to how we spent the "holiday" . . .

Hot glue-gunning. For some reason both the big boys were given free reign to the glue gun. My counter still hasn't recovered.

Sledding.

Playing Sorry. We attempted it first with our big boys; let's just say it was MUCH more enjoyable with just the two of us. 🙂

More sledding.

Cookie-decorating with my sister.

Game night with Eric's siblings.

That was all over the span of about five days, as the ice continued to keep us home. Then the snow melted, and the weather warmed back up, and school opened again, and Eric went back to work, and real life reappeared. And you know what, I'll take real life any day.

But what a trip. What a sick. What a holiday. (And what a long post to try to cover all of it.) 🙂

Thank You, Father, for Your goodness through all of it.