January, Part Two

Pretty much only two things have happened since the middle of January - we took a trip down to Cincinnati, and it's been snowing.

First things first. My sister Amy deserves a medal! We are very much in her debt. She offered to watch our kids (again) so we could take a trip down to Cincinnati and look for a house. It was SO helpful! We drove down on a Friday afternoon and had dinner and sort of helped to get the kids to bed and then Jeremy and drove down to Cincy. We spent all day Saturday with our realtor looking around and went to church on Sunday, as well as looked around some more. Jeremy worked down there on Monday while I toured a few schools and then we headed back up to get the kids. We feel so blessed! Amy is almost exactly halfway in between here and Cincinnati, and then we were able to stay with Jeremy's cousin down in Cincinnati, making the whole trip very smooth and easy. Thank you thank you!

Since we've been back, it's pretty much been snowy. Last Saturday night, it started snowing and continued for 26 hours. Chicago got over 19 inches in that time and we got between 15-16 inches. Church was canceled on Sunday because it was a blizzard, and school was canceled again on Monday. We woke up to sunny skies though and all the snow looked so beautiful! Then yesterday it started snowing again, and we got another couple inches, and it's snowing again today!

The kids have LOVED it though. I'm always hesitant to go out with them, but once I do I always have a great time! Luckily we are well equipped, so we stay pretty warm even when it's down in the teens and twenties. I usually don't let them go out if it's below 5 or 10 degrees, haha, but anything above 20 seems pretty toasty when you're all bundled up.

Here are some phone pictures from our fun in the snow the last month:

 Snow here doesn't pack like it does out in Utah. It's usually way too dry and fluffy to form any sort of ball, so a lot of work went into forming this little snowman!

 They named him Frosty. :)

 We played lots of games on our no-church-day!

 The wind was blowing really hard during the blizzard, so we had patches of ground where you could still see the grass and others with over two feet of snow.

 Hard to tell, but this is past my knees!

 The boys loved climbing up on top of the giant snow piles left by the snow plows. They kept saying, "We're climbing Mt. Everest!" And then they'd slide down.

 This little punkin was not quite as enthused about the whole idea of playing in the snow while it was cold and snowing. She went into the garage to play in the car after a few minutes.

 Triumph!

And a few from the camera. I don't usually take it out in the snow, but I did a couple times:

 It was really pretty this particular morning. We had some freezing fog (which I had never heard of) and it made all the trees white.

See Mom, winter can be fun! :)