Phuket on Christmas Day

We have been a lot of places since we moved to Laos. Most of those trips have been anything but relaxing. Lots of people go home to Europe or Australia around Christmastime, but it's really the best time for weather in southeast Asia. We went to Phuket, which came highly recommended. Matt did a bunch of research on the best beach and resort for families, and he did a fantastic job! It was definitely the most relaxing of any of our trips so far, because the hotel and the beach were our destination, not just a place to collapse at the end of a busy day. And, the clientele was almost exclusively families of young children, who understood when our kids had total meltdowns on the beach or at breakfast or anywhere in between. (And we understood when their children did the same!) It was wonderful.

 We went to the beach Christmas night to see if we could watch the sunset, but it was pretty cloudy. We did buy some slingshot helicopters and we had fun shooting those up in the air.

 The resort was all decorated for the holidays, which was fun.

 One of the recommendations for Phuket is FantaSea. I thought it was just a circus type show, but there were a bunch of other attractions to keep us busy before we got to the theater.

 There were two white tigers, but it was hard to get good pictures. One of them was sleeping for a lot of the time we were there, but then the other tiger sneaked up on her and they had a little fight. It was intense.

 They had little carnival games.

 This is the outside of the theater.

It was definitely not a normal Christmas Day, but it was fun to spend lots of time with my little family in a very beautiful place.

This is a different day on the beach... Photos on Matt's cell phone. This is one sand castle Matt made with the boys. We had to keep them busy on shore if one of us wanted to go swim in the deep.

We had great big waves on one of the days. It was hard to get a good shot of him, but Matt rode a few waves all the way in. Scott even did some body surfing and caught a few. I saw him go under a couple of times and I was worried, but then he stood up and said, "That was awesome!"