Happy New Year

I can't believe a year has gone, they seem to go by so fast. We have really been talking a lot lately about things we have been thankful for this past year. Here's a few . . .


H ealth
A melia's good cooking!
P laying with family and friends that have taken the time to come and visit us this past year
P laying and watching baseball for the boys
Y oung Luke was baptized

N ew England in the fall
E ating good food out of our garden
W restling with Dad

Y oung boys running around our house bringing lots of joy and laughter
E specially thankful for Mike's job in this struggling economy
A ctual quality time spent with each other and good family and friends
R ejoicing in the gospel

We hope all of you have a Happy New Year!

Weather

I'm still having a hard time understanding the weather back here during the winter time.


Ice was two weekends ago

Huge amounts of snow was last weekend

This weekend it's spring like weather at almost 60 degrees!!

Can't wait to see what next weekend will bring!

Merry Christmas

We hope that all of you had a Merry Christmas. We thought of so many of you and are appreciative of your cards and emails. It would be so nice to see all of you more often.

We have had a wonderful couple of days shared with many good friends and our family. We have felt blessed and are thankful for that.

Don't forget to track santa . . .

http://www.noradsanta.org/en/home.html

Ornaments

When we decorated our tree this year, I mentioned our ornament tradition. Each year we add an ornament (sometimes more then 1) that reminds of us something we did throughout the year. A friend wanted to know what ornaments we added so here they are. Like I mentioned before we were slow in getting our ornaments for 2007 (it was a busy year with lots of memorable events) so for this Christmas we added 2007 and 2008 ornaments.

2008 ornaments

This ornament is from when we went to Maine with Mike's parents we had a great weekend there, including ride a schooner through Boothbay harbor. The ornament looks exactly like the boat we were on, same colors and everything. On the back of the ornament it says "The Eastwind" which was the name of our schooner.

Mike brought this back from Switzerland

2007 ornaments
Red Sox won the world series last year- we also went to the celebration parade. It was fun to be a part of it.

Josh started kindergarten

The boys went to NYC for their first time (really Ben and Luke's second but they were to young to remember the first) and we all went to the Statue of Liberty for the first time.

This drummer boy represents us moving back to Boston. Just a couple of months after we moved here, we were part of the reenactment of the Boston massacre. Ben was a British solider and Luke was the drummer boy. We also went to several more reenactments throughout the year.

After 53 hours of snowing, it finally stopped

The snow just kept coming and coming. I don't think I have ever seen it snow for so long at one period of time. Because of the weather church was cancelled (what a bummer it was our Christmas program today). Luke as you can see, was devestated.
Opal, a good friend of ours has been training to go to Iraq, she was on her way home to spend Christmas with her family before getting deployed, but because of the storm her flight was cancelled so she spent the weekend with us before trying to leave again on Monday. Ben D. and Jean also spent the day with us. We had a late breakfast then held our own sacrament meeting. I love the spirit that that can bring in your own home. It was a neat feeling.


Then out to the snow we went.

We made snow balls, snow forts and did a lot of sledding. Tried to sled in the street but that didn't work very well - I know I'm such a good example.

Between the hills in our front yard and our neighbors, that was sufficent.

Look at my great biff into the snow. LOVELY! When we would slide to the bottom of the hill, we would slide into the snow bank which would completely cover me up to my waist.

We had such a great day. We came in and defrosted, had a great dinner and are warming by the fire as we speak. Because of this storm, I feel like I've been on vacation, removed from the world. It's the weekend before Christmas and instead of shopping and rushing I've barely left the house and better yet just played with my kids. It's been a good weekend I wish it didn't have to end.

Just to give you an idea of how much snow we've recieved.

This picture was taken just a couple of hours after the storm started on Friday afternoon.
Saturday morning - notice the white sign on the barrel.

Sunday mid morning - white sign is now covered

Sunday evening - the snow has now stopped. We now have close to 2 feet. Not bad for one weekend.

what a week

Mike spent the week in Germany and Switzerland this week. He really enjoyed seeing a new side of the world and I can't wait until he goes back so I can go with him!

Let it snow, let it snow, let it snow . . . .

It's that time of year again, where I can dedicate an entire blog just to our New England weather! Last weekend ice this weekend snow. We are supposedly in between two storms a big one on Friday and a big one on Sunday with a nice break on Saturday. But it started snowing yesterday afternoon and hasn't stopped. To me, it's just one continous huge storm. I don't remember ever seeing such a steady stream of snow for such a long period of time. I'm sure you all know what LOTS of snow means.

LOTS OF SNOW = SNOW DAY!!!

Notice the difference in the snow totals from this picture and the one above. We now have over a foot of snow and are supposed to get 8 more inches tomorrow.

Goodbye Amelia

Ameila left on Sunday and we have really missed having her here. It's always so fun when she comes, everyone enjoys it.

One night while she was here we were about ready to start a movie. Ben was upset because he wasn't going to be able to watch the movie with us because he had so much homework that night. Luke and Josh decided they weren't going to watch a movie without him, so they went down stairs and decorated the basement for Amelia. It was pretty cool, they cleaned up the basement so it looked nice and then they hung signs, streamers, and balloons. Then had us all write her notes on the signs and chalkboard. I'm telling you we all love Amelia!!!

Another thing that we all love about Amelia is she is an AWESOME cook (my neighbors and friends love that too!). When she comes we usually try out new recipies that she has found and make all sorts of other fun stuff and this time was no exception. She sends me a menu and the list of stuff I need to buy, so it's generally all here by the time she gets here. While she was here on this trip HOLY COW we didn't STOP baking. Except to watch the 14 Christmas movies that she brought for us to watch!

I tried to take pictures of everything we made but I kept forgeting so here is a list. I will try to remember everything . . .
- Cream of potato soup
- Whoopie pies (Ben's request)
- Cream of Broccoli soup
- Christmas tree cake and winterwonderland (Luke's request
- Clam chowder (new family fav)
- Mint brownies (Josh's request)
- Navy bean and Ham soup
- Sugar cookies
- Black eye pea and ham soup (Mike's request)
- Orange chicken and rice
- carmals (twice)
- French bread (twice)
- Thin mints
- Fiesta lime chicken quesadillas
- truffels (twice)
- Lisle H. wheat bread (she taught us how to make it -it's fabulous bread- then we made it on our own on two different occasions to make sure we have the recipie right- we're still a little unsure)
- Black bean fiesta salad
- Peppermint bark
- Marshamllows -who knew you could make marshmallows? They are SO YUMMY!
- and of course LOT'S of hot chocolate to go with the marshmallows.

That's all I can remember. I still can't believe that in the 12 days she was here we made all that stuff, watched all 14 of our movies (some twice), pulled off the RS Christmas party, decorated gingerbread houses, had pack meeting, our ward christmas party, and survived an ice storm. It was a blessing that we had so much food during the ice storm, we were able to feed everyone that walked through the door.

Amelia, THANK YOU for everything, we had a great time. We love and miss you!!!!

*** Note - we didn't eat all that food. A lot of goodie plates were given away and a lot of the soups went into the freezer.

Arrow of light

Amelia is gone, the ice storm is over, kids are back in school I'm running out of excuses to get caught up on updating the blog. So here it is.

On Wednesday (while Amelia was still here) Ben was awarded his arrow of light award in scouts. We were all proud of him. He worked hard to get that award.

The amazing thing is that in just a few weeks he will be out of cub scouts offically. My little boy isn't so little anymore!