The day after Thanksgiving is actually my favorite. It's when we pull out all of the decorations, start watching Christmas movies (who am I kidding, I've been watching Christmas movies for the last two weeks - thank you Hallmark Channel), and start wrapping presents to go under the tree. I thought this year Caleb and Amelia would like to make a gingerbread house. Amelia just wanted to eat all the candy and Caleb just wanted to eat the house.
We don't have any outdoor decorations, so I put Shawn to work on building me a rustic reindeer. I think he succeeded!
Then it was time to decorate the tree...but some of our lights were burnt out, so it got postponed to Sunday afternoon. I am typically a perfectionist, but I decided to let that go and let them decorate how they wanted. I must say, I like the 15 decorations on one branch at the bottom of the tree look:o)
Saturday we headed to Mt. Baker to get our feet in some snow. We had the car all packed with snow gear and toys and Caleb kept asking, are we there yet?
We went to the top and Shawn decided to ask if there were any good snowshoe trails or places to sled. We've been here before, but wasn't sure if the lake was frozen over enough to get out there. Shawn was told that we really shouldn't be up there unless we had avalanche training. He said look lady, I have a 2 year old. I don't plan on getting out too far. We just want to play in the snow. She informed him that she couldn't tell him anything else because of liability (if you're not on the ski slope, you're out of their jurisdiction). So, we decided to try it out on our own. We got bundled up and walked to the lake. Shawn tried it first and his foot was in water just at the edge. We decided that it probably wasn't safe and opted to drive to another spot. Again, we have been here before, so we know this area.
But, we got up on top and realized that even though they have 50", it wasn't all packed down yet and we pretty much were in waste deep snow. We were only about 5 feet from the car, but every step I took, I sank deeper and the hole got bigger. I couldn't even stand up. And we realized that where ever our feet when it, there was the top of a tree! Shawn walked back to the car and put on his snowshoes and came back to get Amelia. I couldn't even get my snowshoes on and had to roll off to the side to get out of the hole. At this point, we decided it was unsafe and maybe we did need avalanche training to be out there. We hopped back in the car and headed to eat. Two hours out there, 30 minutes getting ready, 10 minutes in the snow, two hours back - Shawn marks it up as an epic failure!
But you know what, we had blue skies the entire day and we got to see snow in the mountains. I'm ok with how the day went. We'll try again once they get some more snow!
