Here are a few things I’m looking forward to the most about our trip to Wyoming:

• There will be reason to drink hot chocolate since it will be about 30 degrees cooler than here! Who knows, I might even break out the Christmas music <grin>! Actually, I confess I already have been listening to Psalty’s Christmas Sing-along with Brennan.

• I’ll get to put Brennan in this for the rodeo and he’ll be a perfect match with Pops who is already up there and bought a cowboy hat within a few hours of landing in Jackson Hole:

• It’s an anomaly called quiet and life with limited, if no, access to technology.

• Hearing “wad dat?”, a hundred times a day from an eager boy discovering all sorts of new things and watching his little face light up.

• Celebrating an amazing man’s birthday and being able to give him his birthday cake without a stolen slice, which has happened on occasion, at least with the icing. I can’t say that all of the trail mix I made is still around though.

• Breathtaking beauty.

• Seeing if I can still ride a horse. Here’s to hopin’ I get an old slow-poke.

• Trading sheep, wheat, ore, and brick until the wee hours of the morning with Mac and Julie playing Settlers of Catan. Well, probably not until the wee hours of the morning ‘cause I ain’t a spring chicken anymore.

• Catching some extra z’s.

• Conversations around the dinner table.

• Wildlife sightings. Sightings, not gorings.

To tell you we are loaded down with baby gear would be an understatement. Albeit looking like pack rats, we’re ready to go!

Love to you all! I’ll see you on the other side of twenty cups of hot chocolate and about a hundred imitations of a bear’s growl.