After another extended absence, we’re back, this time bearing pictures from the 2011 holiday season, highlighted by our trip to see Grandma Flack in Nebraska. This year’s trip was a little bit bittersweet for Julie and the kids, as it was the first time we’ve spent the holiday at Grandma’s new house in Norfolk. Of course, Julia and Joseph adapted quickly: they were thrilled out of their minds to be spending a whole week in a house with stairs (or, as they call it, a “stair house”) and sleeping in the basement.

As usual when we fly to Nebraska, our midday flight out of San José left us arriving in Omaha late in the evening, and the two-hour drive to Norfolk meant that we weren’t going to get there at a decent hour. In a change from previous Christmas trips, we rented a car at the airport; this assuaged our guilt about our late arrival somewhat, because it meant that Julie’s brother Bill didn’t have to trek down to Omaha to pick us up. The kids were inexplicably excited about the rental (more Wong vocabulary: a “borrow car”), but there was a small wrinkle: the box of gifts we’d checked on the flight over—necessarily only because I somehow managed to have most of our gifts shipped to our house instead of Nebraska—wouldn’t fit in the trunk. Somehow, Julie managed to squeeze it in, albeit not with doing significant damage its structural integrity. It wouldn’t be the same again.

Julia and Joseph are at an age where flying with them actually isn’t torture. This worked out well for us, because there was a glitch with our tickets that resulted in us being separated on the first leg of our flight. I probably should have been worried when United’s online check-in system wouldn’t work for my reservation, but didn’t have a problem with everyone else’s. Everything was fine when we got to the counter to check our luggage, however, and it wasn’t until I tried to board that things went sideways and the computer rejected my boarding pass out of hand. Fortunately, the gate agent was able to straighten things out in short order.

As I was saying, the kids were well-behaved pretty much the whole time we were airborne. Julia spent most of the time doing Mad Libs, which I wasn’t aware had made the transition to the twenty-first century. Other than the fact that she had to be dissuaded from using the same adjective for every blank on a particular page, she more or less got the hang of it. For Joe, the highlight of the day came as we were boarding the flight from Denver to Omaha. The captain, having overheard one of the flight attendants chatting with Julia, noticed Joe as he came aboard and invited him into the cockpit. He gave him a quick rundown of the controls, let him sit in the pilot’s seat, and even let him try on his hat. I have no idea if this was legal or kosher in this hyper-paranoid era, but it absolutely made Joe’s day. He spent the rest of the flight telling people that he had learned how to be a pilot and trying to explain to me which handle controlled the air brake.

On the topic of security, I got to go through the body scanners that are funding Michael Chertoff’s retirement on the way out of San José, so if you find naked pictures of me on the Internet, that’s totally the reason, not my seldom-indulged exhibitionist streak.

Everyone had a blast the whole time we were in Nebraska. We got to eat at Runza and, for the first time in almost 13 years, Jimmy John’s; we helped Julie’s brother Andy help set up a new computer for Grandma Flacks, which I sincerely hope is still working; Julie and I managed to sneak out of the house after the kids went to sleep to catch a movie; and we had lots of time to relax, read books and do Lego with the kids—Andy was especially involved in that process. Of course, Julia and Joseph were most excited to see their only cousins, Tony and Greg. Tony and Greg have lots of cousins on their mother Beth’s side, so they were probably a bit baffled by the raw intensity of the attention they received from our kids, but they handled the situation with grace and aplomb. Little do they know that their kindness only ensures that Julia and Joseph will be equally enthusiastic the next time they come for a visit.