Merry Christmas!

We had a fantastic Christmas day! We stayed in our pajamas, played with all our new toys and ate candy all day long.

Here's Maddie with the Christmas bounty before we started to open things.

The frenzy begins!

Maddie helped John open his presents. He understood that they contained toys for him, but he liked someone else to open it while he watched on.

Those cheeks are so full of chocolate that he can't even chew.

Little John is fully capable of walking, has never seen anyone walking with two canes, but intuitively knew that he could balance on them to walk. Note the large piece of chocolate hanging out of his mouth.

A wonderful friend gave us all her Thomas trains and John played with them all day.

I hope Christmas brought you all great joy and happiness. It was so much fun here I don't want to go to sleep. We let the kids stay up until after 11 PM. We are probably going to pay for it tomorrow, but today was absolutely perfect!

Christmas Eve

Christmas Eve was calm and bright at our house. We slept in, then went sledding with one of Maddie's friends from school.

We had a nice mellow afternoon and I even took a nap. We started our family evening tradition by reading Luke 2 and using the navitiy set to act it out. Somehow this is a tradition in Maddie's mind, but I didn't know we were supposed to do it that way. We sang carols, watched Merry Christmas Charlie Brown and had cookies and popcorn for dinner. The kids were in bed by 9:00 and we followed shortly after that.

Preparing to shop

Last night the kids and I were going to run to Costco to pick up a few last-minute things. I'd been working on their pajamas for a couple of days. Maddie was dying to wear hers, so we thought we might as well put John in his. They got quite a few cute comments while we were shopping.

What can fall in twelve hours...

When we went to bed around midnight, Jared had gone out to do a pre-shovel on the 2-3 inches of snow that had fallen. By the time we were up and about the storm had ended. We had between 18-23 inches of snow depending on where you measured. The wind was blowing like crazy and created drifts that increased the depth in places.

Here's what it looked like outside our garage. There is a white-branched tree and some bushes that mark the end of our driveway. It took us over two hours to shovel it with both Jared and I working the whole time. We even had to dig out a place for the mail-man to reach our mailbox.

Jared decided to take some of the weight off the porch and got out the ladder. Our porch is raised up off the ground by about two feet, then has a waist-high railing on top if that helps to gain perspective of the snow piles.

The average annual snowfall for our town is about 30 inches. We may have gotten it all in one storm!

A little bit...

What did you wake up to this morning? We discovered something between 18 and 24 inches of snow. I'll get the official tally when we can muster up enough energy to go and shovel our 50-foot-driveway. It's going to be a very long task.

Thanksgiving Feast

We had a great Thanksgiving. Jared's parents, brother and grandmother came to our home for the week. It was so nice to have time to relax and just enjoy the holiday! I enjoyed making the food because we were not on a strict timeline and we just enjoyed the day. I got to stay home and nap with John-John while the turkey cooked and the rest of the family went for a drive. Everyone pitched in and helped get the table ready. It was just such a nice pleasant day. I hope to repeat it for many Thanksgivings to come!