Christmas Day

Actually, we pretended that the 26th was Christmas Day due to the "Blizzard '09" delays.

We celebrated Jesus' birthday by singing and eating yummy cake.
Caroline loved her cake.
There were 15 stockings to fill. It is a group effort with each family contributing to everyone's stocking. My Mother-in-law, Pam, has made all of the stockings for 7 grandkids and all of the kids in law. What a labor of love.
Caroline enjoyed looking through her stocking. 7 kids ages 10 months to 8 years. It was pretty much impossible to get all of them looking at the camera at once much less smiling or even happy.

Emily, Katherine and Hannah
Emily and Ty
Katherine and Hannah both received Fancy Nancy dolls along with a few outfits that Grammy made for the dolls.
I made Hannah, Ty, Nathan and Caroline superhero/super princess capes.
Katherine posing with all of her loot.
Uncle George with Hannah and Katherine and their Fancy Nancy dolls.

More Snow!

When we finally arrived at Sam's parents' house, we were not disappointed at all in the snow. Officially there was 7.8 inches but George, Sam's brother measured 10 inches and in some places it was 15 inches deep! That is more than any of us have seen without traveling to the mountains. The cousins had already been playing in the back yard for a day and they built a great fort complete with icicle spikes to keep out intruders. Even with all of that snow being a part of the fort, there was a ton of snow on the ground. We made snowballs and started our snowman. The snow was still a bit dry and not sticking well.


Caroline did better than yesterday but still was not a huge fan of the snow. It was so hard for her to walk and move.

They kept the front yard pretty so that we would have fresh snow to play in when we arrived. They did shovel the driveway and sidewalk and used that snow to make a tunnel.

I was surprised that even Caroline climbed through the tunnel.

Before we let them play in the front we got a photo of all the cousins - Katherine, Caroline, Nathan, Hannah, Ty and Emily. Zac (10 months) stayed inside.

Our kids did not last long outside. I was a little sad about this but they have no idea what a big deal this amount of snow is. They were cold and wanted to go inside to play instead.

Merry Christmas from Katherine

Katherine meticulously colored this page for her best friend Elise. Of course I had to scan it as it is her best coloring to date. She wishes you all a Merry Christmas (I am just very late in posting it:)

White Christmas

For the first time in 83 years we had a White Christmas. It actually snowed on Christmas Eve and stuck around for Christmas. Due to the busy-ness of packing to leave town we did not get out into the snow until a lot of it had already melted.

We have a lot of cold weather gear for a family that sees little cold weather. Some of it is from when we lived in Norway and I have picked some up when I see it cheap at consignment sales. So, both kids had snowsuits, snow boots, as well as the usual hats, gloves and coats.
Caroline did not like being bundled up. Part of the problem was that her boots were too big. Once we took them off and put on other shoes she was happier. She still would rather be held than play in the snow.
Katherine enjoyed it. The snow was a bit dry for snowballs and she had to wear her fleece mittens which stuck to the snow.
She did get a good snowball to throw though.




We attempted to make a snowman but the snow was just too dry and there was not much to start with. We were in a hurry to get on the road so this was all we made. It was really more of a snow pyramid than a snowman.
She wanted to make a snow angel but then was cold and did not really finish it.

Christmas Eve

Since we decided not to leave and drive through the weather to get to Sam's parent's house today, we were able to go to dinner with my parents at our family's favorite Mexican restaurant and then the Christmas Eve service at our church. It was freezing cold outside so you can't see that we are all dressed very festive under our coats.

Christmas morning

We celebrated Christmas morning with just our family of four on Christmas Eve because the plan was to go to Sam's parents house 2.5 hours away after lunch to celebrate Christmas there. After seeing what Santa brought we had a big breakfast of pancakes, sausage and cheese eggs before getting dressed and opening presents.

This year our goal was really to scale down on Christmas and not totally spoil our kids. That is so hard because we love them so much and there are so many things I know they would enjoy. We really wanted to have a Christ focused Christmas though and having an overwhelming amount of gifts when it is HIS birthday does nothing to bring the focus to Christ's birth. We gave each person in our family 4 gifts. We were going to go with the cute themes I read about "something to wear, something to read, something you want, something you read" but our gifts just did not fit into those categories so we just had one from each other person in our family, including the dog.Both girls really got into opening presents. Caroline received a book, a Belle dress up outfit, a baby doll with stroller and a dinosaur toy with balls and tunnels. She loved all of her toys and the beauty of her age is that the only thing that I bought new was the book. The rest of the gifts were either Katherine's at this age or bought at consignment sales.
Katherine received a bag of books, a pettiskirt (tutu on steroids), a dress up costume and a Ballerina magnet doll (like paper dolls).You can tell she loves the pettiskirt.

Mommy and Daddy do not get as exciting of gifts. I actually bought most of my gifts myself this year.

It was a fun morning with just the 4 of us. The kids had a great time. It ended up leading into a stressful afternoon as it began to snow up north and we had to decide if we were going to drive to Sam's parents or wait a day. It was an emotional decision as Katherine was asking every 10 minutes when she would get to go see her cousins and of course we all want to be together for Christmas. Sam was checking the weather reports and talking to family as I was finishing the packing and loading of the car. We ended up deciding to hold of driving and that ended up being a wise decision. Sam's sister, Carissa, left about an hour or so before when we were going to leave and her family ended up stranded for 11 hours in one place when a truck jacknifed and they were trapped on slick roads. They spent the night in their car with their kids and ended up having a 2.5-2 hour drive take 21 hours.