Pre-Chaos Catch-Up

That title is a mouthful! With tomorrow being Christmas and later today being the annual M family Christmas Eve get-together, well, there should be lots of pictures to share this weekend so I really needed to take a break from the wrapping to write about some of the events of the last week.

First, there is the getting-ready-for-Xmas stuff we have been doing - typical things like mailing the cards, buying the presents, attending some parties, decorating the house, etc.  Oh yeah, and in the middle of all this, the kids' school decided that there should be a "Dress as your Favorite Book Character Day" thrown in.  The kids chose their favorites based on what we could throw together without one more trip shopping.

This year we made the kids three kinds of jar gifts for the "teachers" at the school... we put the dry ingredients into jars that they can then use to make brownies, M&M cookies, or Cranberry Hootycreeks (cookies with no chocolate ~ there is a person on the planet who does not like chocolate and she is right here in our small town!). We finished the jars by putting a pretty snowman fabric tied with ribbon around the top, and attached the recipe and a note from the kids (forgot to get a picture of that part).  We made 24 total and 23 headed to school with the kids and one went to Doug's school. While putting them together was pretty, um, messy (we are still skating across the kitchen floor where the flour fell and sticking in the dropped sugar patches, even post-vacuuming and mopping), the kids enjoyed it and we hope the finished products turned out okay but with none left, we didn't get to test them out!

Check out all the white stuff at our house!!!  Almost 20 inches and we have one drift on the back porch taller than Doug!  The kids could hardly wait to sled and play outside so we dragged out all the snow gear and headed out...

I was bummed that my pictures were all a bit fuzzy and though I had done something to my camera until I realized that "the fuzz" is the snow still coming down!  A few pictures need some explanation: Brynn is pouting in the one because she wasn't getting a sledding turn but really the boys were just trying to pack the powder down to make a path, Nyah is pouting because she was miserable but in her defense it was windy and still coming down, kudos to my nephew & Caleb for working to make a decent hill, there were quite a few wipeouts in the process of making a hill, and Price just loved the snow because he could play in it and eat it!

Evan was inside most of the time when I had my camera out because football bowl picks were due and he had to quadruple-check his choices but I did get one picture through the window screen.

The evening after the snowfall we went to a friend's farm to sled down some BIG hills.  What a blast!  Nothing like sledding down a hill under lots of stars and hearing the cows moo at the finish line!  The bonfire at the top of the hill helped take the chill off. All of us but Nyah would have stayed hours longer. I brought my little camera that night and tried to take some pictures while going down the hill.  Picture taking in the pitch dark at high speeds is a bit challenging!  The one of Price coming down the hill happened because the people at the top of the hill didn't know I had a camera and they kept seeing a flashing light so they sent down Price to make sure I was alright and that it wasn't an emergency signal!   Caleb and Doug even conquered the big hill ~ the people who invited us got a good laugh at the fact that very few people went down the big one in the daylight when riders could see what it really looked like; the dark made people brave!

More this weekend!