A very Merry Christmas

We awoke to a HUGE amount of snow and blizzard conditions. As you can see from the photo below my husband had to dig out before he could take the dog out this morning. I took this photo sometime before 7:00 a.m. Our boys were up and ready to see what was under the tree by 6:30 a.m. Apparently my big boy had been awake much earlier than that but my husband held him off until 6:30. Because of the snow we did not go to our church's Christmas Eve service last night. I am 40 years old. I can honestly not remember ever missing church on Christmas Eve. It was a little different to say the least. However, we enjoyed a quiet evening at home. We did our Advent wreath and were able to finally light the Christ candle in the center. My oldest son found three stories in his Jesus Storybook Bible that he wanted to read aloud for our home Christmas Eve service. My husband, little boy and I used our fabric Nativity characters to "act out" the stories as he read them. It was quite nice.





Here are a few more photos of our massive snowfall. You can see how the snow has drifted against our chicken coop halfway up the windows. I had to step through huge drifts to get out there today.






And this big mound is on our deck.






It is still snowing as I write this post at about 6:45 p.m. We usually have our extended family on my side over on Christmas day. As I wrote earlier, we were planning to get together on Tuesday but couldn't due to the weather. We have yet to reschedule that event and my oldest son has asked me several times today when we will have it. I am glad that being with family is such an important part of Christmas for him. When we planned the big get-together for Tuesday we still planned to have my parents over here on Christmas Day. Because of weather that didn't happen either. So it was just the four of us home all day. In all honesty our little family being snowbound and together all day has made this the most peaceful and relaxing Christmas in my memory. We just hung out all day. The boys played with their new toys. I read a book for large periods of time and played with the boys off and on. My husband relaxed some too in between going out and shoveling every few hours so we could at least get out our doors. It was a really nice day and I feel so very blessed to have a family whom I love dearly.



The boys both loved their gifts. I didn't get many pictures of their new toys without the boys in the picture. Below you can see the Hot Wheels race track that my little boy got. He loved it and has played with it a lot all day. My big boy got a few new geography puzzles among other things and is in his room assembling Asia as I write this. He also got a cool circuitry kit and has been constructing projects from that as well.

And I am thrilled to report that today, Christmas Day 2009, was a 4-EGG DAY!! I went out mid-morning to check and found one egg on the floor of the coop and one chicken, Reba, trapped against the wall in the nesting basket!! Poor baby! Apparently someone in the coop had flipped the basket over against the wall and Reba couldn't get out. She probably trapped herself. So.....I repositioned the crate so that can't happen again. When I went out in the late afternoon to bring fresh water I found 3 MORE eggs! This can only mean one thing.........now all of our hens are laying. I loved that one of the eggs was really dark brown. It actually brought back a childhood memory that I will share here. I hadn't thought of this in about 30 years. When I was in elementary school we were asked to bring an egg to school for an art project. When we pulled out our eggs in art class my egg was the only brown egg in the class. I do not remember specifics, but I do remember being teased about the color of my egg. I also remember feeling embarrassed about having the only egg that was different. And I think I was even mad that someone would make an issue of the color of my egg. Anyway........we made Santa and Mrs. Claus faces out of our eggs. I went ahead and made a brown Mrs. Claus. It's funny how something can trigger a memory like that..........I haven't thought about it for years. Below is a photo of our diverse, multi-cultural, egg collection from today. I am excited to cook these up tomorrow morning. After my last egg post I got a great comment giving me specific guidelines for cooking an egg. Thanks, Annicles. Also, I now know that my good buddy, Amber, is an eggspert at cooking eggs. Who knew? I knew she could bake an awesome cake, but eggs? You learn something new every day!

PS: I almost forgot! This morning I knocked over our Christmas tree when reaching under it for a gift. The leg broke off just as it had on our other Christmas tree. So.........that makes 2 artificial trees that I've accidently broken in the last few weeks. My little boy burst into tears when the tree fell down but recovered quickly when presented with the distraction of opening all his gifts. DH and I decided that this is a sign that from now on we will get a real tree every year. We've talked about it in the past but when we had an artificial one to use it didn't seem practical. Now it seems like a necessity. So that's a new tradition we can look forward to next year.