Fun in the snow

Winter

After Christmas we took advantage of our proximity and spent most of our after Christmas time with family. While we were away, Edgewood got hammered with snow. Our driveway was a foot deep! after getting stuck and unstuck, we parked the car at the end of the driveway and trudged into the house.

The next day Katie and I hand shovelled the whole driveway. It felt good to be out working together.

The kids enjoyed the piles we were making

I learned recently that fresh snow absorbs sound, lowering ambient noise over a landscape because the trapped air between snowflakes attenuates vibration. It is why you enjoy so much silence in the snow. Despite the hard work, the morning was peaceful.

New Mexico

One of our favorite things about New Mexico:

Christmas, etc.

 Christmas Eve we had our traditional Shepherd's dinner. Brad put it all together beautifully. This year we especially enjoyed the orange fig jam and Havarti cheese.

Some of Brad's presents. He looks like a super-villain in his mask and coat

This week

 I started the week by getting horribly sick. Ruth managed to make cookies all by herself that day, make everyone lunch and wrote me this cute note as I stayed in bed all day long. Once I'd recovered we went to a really cool workshop at our library. They taught the kids about circuits and let them build their own light-up book mark with special thread to complete the circuit from the light bulb to the battery pack.

Friday we went to see Star Wars 7. We loved it

Claire got some work done

And here are our Christmas Sunday pics

Ruth has loved cooking and baking and she really wanted to make mashed potatoes, so she made a fabulous chicken and potato dinner for us Sunday night. And after stuffing ourselves, everyone went to play with Lego's while Claire and I napped on the couch.

Baking and other activities

 Recently we went to the Children's Museum in Santa Fe. The kids had a blast.

We've also spent a decent amount of time at the library. Our library is very small but also really cool.  If you look closely you can see some dinosaurs Will drew in the kid's corner.

And Ruth found a baking book at the library, so she's been doing a lot of baking. Nothing has turned out very well, but I'm sure the end product will get better with time. She's definitely light years ahead of me in the baking department. I didn't know how to roll anything out until I was in my 20's!

And of course we have built some adobe gingerbread houses. The kids had so much fun and were thrilled to be able to eat the houses when they were done building.

And it snowed on us again! Merry Christmas