New Years Eve

Fireworks in our driveway. Not a whole lot, but the kids had fun.

My backyard

This is what we can do in Texas at Christmas time. No need to worry about snow, or freezing to death. And the fire is just to get rid of the trees knocked down by Hurricane Ike, not to keep us warm.

Cleaning the Boat

Chad decided to clean his new boat, and all the kids wanted to get in on the action. You know, before they had to do any work, then they'd rather ride the jeep. Between complaining about the cold.

Christmas Day

Santa was able to find us in Texas without any problems. We opened presents at home and then headed over to Chad's house for even more presents. We got so much stuff we had to leave some of it in Texas. But at least we will be home soon to be with it.

Christmas Eve

We went ahead and opened a few presents on Christmas eve. We wanted to be able to head over to Chad's house as early as we could on Christmas day.

Grant's Christmas Concert

We attended Grant's annual Christmas concert tonight. The kids all did a great job and Grant even had a special part. Mason wanted to participate so bad. Although his version of Jingle Bells is "jingle bells, jingle bells, jingle all the way, Old McDonald and Mr. Ride just love to hold the sleigh, Hay!" I've tried to tell him, but he will have none of it!

And here are some videos of the performance.

From Video

From Video

Mason's Christmas Party

Mason had his Christmas party this morning. Everyone had a great time. They had a magician, and then the big man himself showed up. Santa brought everyone a present.

And if you think it looks like any school back home take a look at the map on the wall and the windows. Not something you see everyday back home.

If you click on these they will take you to the videos.

From videos

Juggling

From videos

Mason Juggling

From videos

Mason and Santa

Tyler's Birthday

We didn't do much for Tyler's birthday, but here is his cake. He insisted on an ice cream cake even though it was -10 F outside that weekend.

Snowboarding

We took the kids out snowboarding today, since we finally had some snow. I found a new place that is smaller, so I feel more comfortable just letting the kids go, without paying for lessons. It didn't turn out so well though. The chair lift wasn't open yet, and Grant didn't really have a great time on the t-bar. But he did make it up at least once. It was also quite cold, about 0 F, with a major wind chill around -15 F. Particularly when the boys made it to the top of hill. We didn't last very long, but as you can see we almost had the place to our self. It was pretty nice. We will try this place again, when it has more snow, and its warmer.

Snow!

UPDATE 2: Turns out officially we had 16 cm of snow on Friday, and another 7 cm of snow on Saturday. It measures 15 inches in the yard, but that includes all the snow that blew off the roofs. It was the worst snow storm Edmonton has seen in 6 years.




This is for all of those in Houston excited about the snow. This is the snow we got, on the very same day. Before yesterday there was some snow on the grass, but you could still see the grass. And there was no snow on the sidewalks and driveways. Also these pictures were taken Saturday morning. After we had shoveled our snow 3 times the day before. Look at how deep it is just over night.

UPDATE: We had so much snow cars keep getting stuck on our road. The city doesn't plow residential streets like ours. Everyone is out shoveling the road! Seriously, who ever knew people would shovel the road.