Christmas 2010

Ok I'm finally writing about our Christmas this year. It was busy, busy, but full of fun. I'm committing right now to simplify next year. Remind me to read this then. From about the week before Thanksgiving to the beginning of January I just felt slammed. Joseph had a birthday party the week before and then we had 23 people over for Thanksgiving dinner. It was a ton of fun. Janae and her family came and so did our friends the Greens and Matt and Colleen. Lots of good food and good company! The weeks before Christmas held the usually things shopping for Christmas presents, parties, scout and preschool events. The scouts put on a nativity show for the ward. I was partially in charge of this so it added a bit of stress, but wasn't really my baby so I was able to stress less about it. The kids did a really great job learning lots of songs and acting it out.
I am in a quilting guild here in Connecticut. I'm not really a great quilter, but I do like to sew so it's been fun to learn some new techniques here. It was my turn to host. We had a gift exchange that everyone was supposed to make something homemade for. I made this table runner. It didn't turn out perfectly, but I'm happy with it. I designed it and had fun picking out all the material. We decided to go to Washington DC for Christmas. I didn't want to bring all the presents so we opened them on the Saturday before. Here are a few pictures:

Nathan had a little song presentation at school. He learned the words and sign language to Rudolf the red nose reigndeer and the 12 days of Christmas. It was pretty cute.

Christmas eve nativity at Grandma Rowberry's house.

Joseph and Mary (Nathan and Samantha)

Our family with Grandma Rowberry, Uncle Ryan, Aunt Barb, and Aunt Kristy at the Barlow Center. We spent a lot of time here playing games and visiting. It was fun. We hadn't seen Ryan and Barb for a long time. It was really great to see them.

Snowed in

Samantha and John at the bottom of our hill.

Icecicles on the back of our house.

Bearded Joey and Nathan.

Joey and John on the snow cave.

Ok, so I need to catch up a ton on my posts, but will just start with today because who knows if I will ever actually be able to get everything covered from Thanksgiving and Christmas.

The weather the last couple of weeks has been crazy! In the last 2 weeks the kids have only had 4 1/2 days of school and one of those days was a 90 minute delay. Needless to say we are suffering from a bit of cabin fever. Even the kids were dismayed today to wake up to a blanket of snow and the early morning recorded call from Mrs. Smey cancelling school. Last week the days off were welcome and everyone had a great time building forts and sledding down the hill. This week has been freezing rain and sheets of ice which just means hours of chopping up ice on the drive way and lots of salt. Also the snow on the ground is completely covered with ice so it's not even fun to play in.

On Tuesday a tree on our street fell over and took out the power lines so we were without light or power from about 6 pm to 1 am. It was cold, and I learned that in addition to having flashlights for emergencies, you should keep them in an easily accesible place where you can find them in such an emergency. We were just sitting down to dinner and it was completely dark when the power went out. Justin was still at work. I found the kerosene lamp fairly easily, but we didn't have any kerosene. Then I found the camp lantern we had but realized that the kids had been playing with it and had broken the bulb inside it. I found various pieces to lots of flashlights (including batteries) but couldn't find all the pieces to a single flashlight. (Nathan and his friend Lucas played camp out last week and apparently took apart all the flashlights.) KIDS!! We were finally able to find some candles and I also realized I could use the light of my cell phone to search for things. We ate by candle light and then played some cards. I called Justin at work and asked him to pick up some flashlights on the way home and some firewood. When he got to our street the street was blocked off so he had to walk all the way up the hill carrying a load of firewood and flashlights. The firewood was a little wet so we never actually got a fire going, but put everyone to bed with extra blankets. It was pretty cold and I secretly wondered if we would end up having to pile everyone into one bed to keep warm, but the extra blankets did the job and we were extra toasty when the heat came back on at one. Now I have a long list of emergency supplies to buy (if I can ever actually make it to the store).

Since I began this post it stopped snowing, the sun is out, and the neighbor boys came over and are sledding down the hill. It's super fast now with it's topcoat of pure ice. The snow plow came by and plowed our road, we might even be able to go shopping this afternoon (after a few hours of shoveling the driveway that is). I've never had a desire to own a snow blower till we lived here. But I secretly know that if we buy one it won't snow for the rest of the season and next year will be unseasonably warm and we won't even need it. Ah well, I guess I will just have to put those boys to work ;)