Winter Fun

It's Christmas party time! Oh wait, no, that's just Jonah and Joshua having a tea party. Sorry for the confusion. (Elora got these for her birthday,but its the two boys who always play with them! This is a still from a video, thus the bad quality.)



We did have fun at a Thanksgiving party this year...we were invited over to eat with some folks from church, who some of their kids and grand kids visiting! So while our kids were punks and wouldn't eat much of the bounteous feast, they at least had fun playing with the other kids! And the day after, we made our own Thanksgiving dinner, and invited one of Joseph's coworkers over to share with us. Sadly, this is one of the very few pictures I remembered to take during that holiday:



Look at him go! What a great cook. And don't tell Joseph I posted pictures of him in his apron. heheh.


Well, what do we have here? Christmas decorating! We got to it the day after Thanksgiving, and we were glad we had our big tree in storage...because the local stores didn't have trees for sale until a few weeks later; they were all quite small and sad.


I forgot to take a picture of the finished tree (dang it) but suffice it to say, the lower half is bare of all but lights, due to a small personage in our home who would be removing them otherwise.



Said personage, was a little sad when we were decorating, because everyone kept getting mad at him for pulling things down. Finally he flopped down on the floor next to the tree and stayed there with a grumpy face for the next ten minutes. Poor misunderstood baby. Since this time, his brother Joshua has pulled down and broken several ornaments, and hidden others...so perhaps I was worrying about the wrong kid!



Early on this month we had a Branch Christmas Party of sorts too! We had a chili dinner, a few games for the kids, and then watched the Christmas Devotional together. Elora and Josh were so excited because the other two kids who rarely come to church were there to join in the games.
At the last minute of church that day, I was asked to be in charge of a few games..and I was told which games to do. Instead of the suggested pin-the-ornament-on-the-tree (which seems a little pointless to me because it doesn't matter where you pin it) I decided to do pin the tail on the donkey...with Mary and Joseph. You don't think that's too sacrilegious, do you?



At least they had some fun! (Do you like this photo of my ear?)


We also played musical chairs, then it was time for the Broadcast. Sadly, we lost the feed for a few minutes, right in the middle of Uctdorfs talk about the Grinch. So sad.

This month we've seen some interesting weather as well. School has been cancelled or let out early several times already for high winds and snow, but the coolest thing we've seen was the week or so where we woke up to ice crystals coating everything outside! The first day this happened, the first thing I saw was the railing on our porch, just coated with ice crystals; I loved how you could see every individual crystal.



The ice was on everything be it plant, metal, or plastic!


The camera didn't really capture how sparkly and white everything was, but this picture kind of shows the sparkliness and the whiteness of the day.



I decided to bundle up the kids and head outside to take more pictures. I though I was being so nice to take them out, but Jonah wasn't nearly as excited as I had thought he'd be. He picked up snow with his bare hands several times, and then he cried for fifteen minutes straight because he wanted me to carry him around.


So I guess I was wrong to think 20F was warm enough for everyone to go out and play..it seemed warm compared to the single digit temperatures of the week before! Don't worry, he did eventually have fun walking around with the other kids, at least for a few minutes:



And I got some really cool pictures! I like this one with the tractor because it kind of shows how far we can see on a clear day.




And this one shows how white and coated the grass really is. And, you know, me. You should have seen how many bad shots I got before I managed this one.



A few more:



most of the pictures I took turned out like this one, with the camra showing the dark skeleton of the plant instead of the icecrystals coating it. With the naked eye, this really just looked white!




When I got home and was perusing the shots I had taken on the camera, I was surprised to see that Joseph must have also taken some pictures before he left for work that morning! They were cool because they had those nice, soft sunrise colors in them. This was the rack on top of the car.



And the porch railing.



What a pretty morning.