Snow, Glorious Snow

I promised some pictures of the kids playing in the snow last time... and yes its taken me forever... but finally here they are! And now of course we have about twice as much snow... these were taken a few weeks ago before the temps plummeted to the -20 to -36 range... yes -36 is our low so far for this year. At least the schools were closed that day. I think they close when it gets below -24.

Other than being cold, we've been pretty busy lately with the semester starting back up at the community college. Mike is teaching an Environmental Science course as well as doing his research, which will take him back up to the forest in a week or so. And I am teaching two classes this semester, one an English Comp class and the other one is Intro to Higher Ed, which is study skills and such.

We hope everyone else is doing well! And staying warm!! :)

Maria showing Beatrice snow :)

Getting tired and wondering what to do next

Of course Duncan was all over the place having a ball!

Maria showing Beatrice how to make Snow Angels

Attempting to walk around

Remind anyone of "A Christmas Story"?

Learning the fine art of eating snow.

Just about done

Yep, totally done

Rice Lake Makes Headlines

Too funny. On Monday's Jay Leno show one of his "headlines" was from Rice Lake (about 40 miles from us - we go there for shopping once in a while) about a dog on the freeway that kept outrunning the police. They featured the story on the local news here on Wednesday, and you can read it here.

Other than that, things have been pretty calm and relaxing around here. Maria has been completely obsessed with reading the Twilight series of books. I hate to admit it, but she's got me interested in the series too. While the writing is a tad on the substandard side, the story is pretty engaging... if you like vampires that is ;)

One of these days I will get around to uploading more pictures... its just such a slow going process. I have some really cute ones of the kids playing in the snow, I will try to get them up within a few days here :)

Until then, I hope everyone is doing well and that you all have recovered from the holidays! :)

Happy New Year!

Me and Maria actually made it up till midnight :) and we celebrated with some bubbly juice and butterscotch sugar cookies ;)

Mike actually beat me to a New Year's post, or an End of Year Blog and he summed everything up beautifully. I just can't top it ;)

I hope everyone had an exciting New Year's Eve and here's to 2009! Happy New Year!

Happy Holidays!

I hope everyone had a good Christmas! And we wish you all a happy New Year!

Here are a few pictures we took on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day...

Beatrice voluntarily wearing the antlers ;)

Duncan in his new Batman jammies "checking" his Lightning McQueen Computer

Beatrice giving her baby doll a kiss

Playing with her Little People Castle

The paper was just as fun as the presents :)

Christmas Card

Well, here is our anxiously awaited Christmas card! ;) If you are lucky enough to be on our list, I am mailing them out today! I'm so behind!! ;) So I hope you will get them at least on Christmas Eve ;) If not, here it is.

Believe it or not, this one was the best of the bunch. We had to take at least 20 pictures. This was only about the second one we took, they didn't get any better... ;)

Maria playing the saxophone at her winter concert last night :) the band did an awesome job!
Somehow the video of the winter concert ended up at the bottom of this post...

My favorite picture over the last few weeks... Daddy's gettin all kinds of love :)

Beatrice all bundled up :)

View of the snow from the front porch

And from the back porch

Ah... sharing the chair so nicely

The kids have been watching Shrek The Halls quite a bit, so dragging around their Shrek dolls. Apparently the big one is Mommy Shrek and the small one is Daddy Shrek... probably because Duncan knows who wears the pants in the family! ;)

Simultaneous Shrek chewing.

Duncan's Spiderman Hat! :) (that he wore for maybe a day before he went back to his "hawiian" superhero hat).

And here are the eagerly anticipated videos of Maria's winter concert... The first one is her announcing the song! She was so excited to be able to do that :) and the next one is the first song they did - "winter wonderland," and then the last one is the ending of the song she announced - "Do you hear what I hear."

Getting Ready for X-Mas!!

I was finally able to upload some pictures!!! Yay!! I just had to do them one at a time, otherwise the upload failed out and some of them I had to try a couple of times before they went... but hopefully I have this much success from here on out! I thought I had solved my problem until some failed, but if I have to try a couple of times and only upload one at a time, its better than nothing! :)

As is traditional, we put up the tree and xmas decorations on the day after Thanksgiving! We all had a blast. Duncan really got in there and helped out :) He enjoyed it! It was too funny the way he just jumped in and started decorating the tree with the girls as if he'd always done it!

And this is what baby sister did while we were decorating the tree...

Here comes the antler fest ;)We've gotten a lot of Christmas mileage out of those antlers! :)