winter break

Have I mentioned how much I adore time off of school? 

We’re all pretty happy about that kind of thing around here.
I love being able to be in charge of our own schedule.

And staying in our PJ’s all day if we want to:

The plan this year was to have my whole family join up in Utah.  We haven’t been together at Christmas-time for ages and my little sister started planning over a year ago for us all to be there.

Oh boy did I ever want to go.  But trying to maneuver Christmas was rough.  With five kids and all the festivities and concerts that surround Christmas we decided we couldn’t leave until right after.  And then there were crazy storms on the roads we would be using and our non-four-wheel-drive car would have never made it all those miles.

So we stayed home.

I made us up a calendar so we could keep track of our days.  We kind of made up a Christmas break “bucket list” on that thing.

We went to a college basketball game with cousins (because we have this cool pogo pass thing) and pretty much had the whole place to ourselves.
…which meant the girls got on the jumbo-tron over and over again.They were pretty delighted about that little fact.

On New Years Eve our very kind friends invited us over for a fondue dinner.
Wow, I thought we did fondue right in our family…but they’re the ones who have that thing down I tell you.
After that we headed over with friends to do our third annual Frisbee dodge-ball game.
Once again, fun was had by all.

Check out that father/daughter/son team intensity:More on how that game works back here.

Next we headed with everyone over to a dance party.Dave was “in the zone” I tell you.

He pulled out all the moves.  There were all kinds of awesome prizes if they called the number you stopped on when the music stopped. 

They served breakfast outside until midnight and we watched fireworks.
Our friends kinda know how to do things right:)
On New Year’s Day we opted out of our hiking plan (much to my chagrin but man alive it had been a late night, especially for our teenagers who had split off from us after the dodge ball).

Instead we had a big celebration breakfast with sparkling cider…
…and packed up and headed up to the mountains to find a little snow.
When you live in the desert, views like this take your breath away:
The first day Dave took the big kids off to ski.
And Lu and I set of to make our goal: “build a snowman.”
The snow was sparse and total powder so this is all we could come up with:
Let’s check that puppy out a little closer:There we go.

We had a fun lunch date:
…and some very exciting memory games.
That night we felt our way in the pitch darkness to the hot tub…so dark that the camera couldn’t focus, but oh-so nice and warm.
The next day we skied with cousins.
And finally, after all my years of begging, Dave consented to let Lucy try ski school:Can you tell she was pleased as punch about that?
(We couldn’t catch up with Max for long enough for a family pic., darn it!)

I loved that the girls squeezed in a quick snow photo-shoot before we packed up and headed home.
Love them.

Happy New Year.

In March 🙂