Christmas and New Years

The is what Christian brought home with him from preschool right before Thanksgiving break.

Christian singing at the Christmas party. Collin was so bummed out that he could go up with Christian

While I was sick one night, Jesh got the boys together to call Santa. He made them cheat sheets so that when it came down to telling santa what they wanted they would remember. He used the Vonage Santa line to call. And they email you the recording of your childs voice telling Santa what they want. So cute!

Christians turn

Collins turn

The kids were so excited for Christmas this year. It kinda brings the magic I used to feel back when they are so excited. We opened presents before we went up to C- city. Santa came early, so we wouldn't have to take the toys back and forth. Collin was super excited about his Thomas the Train stuff, which he is currently obsessing about. Christian doesn't really like Thomas the Train but he feels left out if he doesn't get some. So we got him one.

So like I said before we drove to C-city for Christmas. Somehow our long extremely scary Thanksgiving Boise trip wasn't enough for us to swear off winter travel. There was a lot of things pushing us towards Christmas in C- city and we gave in. It was so nice to see family and friends. Even though we didn't get to see all of them and didn't have nearly enough time. It was nice to do the traditional things with our family, like Santa Cruise, caroling, gingerbread houses, baking, game nights, free movies, and LOTS AND LOTS OF FOOD.

The kids were in heaven being around so much family and friends. Jesh and I were too because we actually got to go do stuff. Sadly, Jesh spent a lot of time working because we were worried about not having enough time this summer to do things. My brother travel from cedar city up and he left the monday after Christmas and we should have taken his lead because the weather just kept getting worse. We wanted to stay until after the 1st but with the weather being the way it was we didn't want to risk being stuck.

We set our alarms to leave early thursday morning in hopes of being in I F sometime that day to stay with Jesh's sister. We got up to look at the roads ... mainly the pictures on the highway cams but it was still dark. So we tried to go back to sleep. We ended up not leaving until 10am. Horrible time to start when you have to travel 8 hours.

There was some scary parts but mostly okay. We stopped a lot just trying give the kids breaks and make sure our tank was full incase of an emergency. The weather was in the negatives. We had enough gas to make it all the way but we decided to stop in Dillion MT to top off before we continued our next two hours. We saw a sign on the gas stations door saying the pass was closed. We couldn't believe it was true because the roads were pretty good. So we decided to check it out. Yep, closed. We had to turn around and come back. The pass closed at 2:45 and we drove into town around 4. This is were we can't decided if this was a blessing or not. If we would have left on time would we have made it safely through the pass or not. Would we have ran off the road and been stuck in the frigid weather?

By that time my dad was calling every motel in the area to see if there was anything left. One hotel told us that everything was booked and we would have to stay in an red cross shelter for stranded travelers. So we were looking around for that. The lady running the place told us that there was still rooms available and that they wouldn't open until the hotels were closed. So off we went looking for a room. We ended up getting the second to the last room in all of Dillion and paying out the ears for it. It was a single king size bed for 2 kids and 2 adults. So you might be thinking... not so bad? My kids are the worst to sleep with. Hitting.... Kicking.... whining....etc. I didn't not sleep. Jesh did a little. When we woke up the pass was still not open. So we did the free yucky breakfast thing. We didn't have to check out until 11 but we left at I think 10. And just waited on the side of the road until 12 ish when they finally opened. I was amazed at how many people we stranded and just waiting. When we first started going, we couldn't see what the big deal could have been but as we got further in this is what the roads looked like:
I don't know if you can tell but everything was covered in ice. The weeds had an ice layer over them and the snow in the field reflected like they were ice also. And there was a fine layer of snow over the road that blew up while driving so visibility was bad. It was like 30 miles of really bad and the rest was pretty much clear. To bad we couldn't have just skip that patch and spent the night with family.

We came home to 3 ft snow drift covering our drive way. We had to clear that before we could even go inside. Luckily we had all over or snow stuff in the car. We got a little over half way done with snow-blowing and shoveling when we ran out of gas. And we decided to call it quits. We had Rach and the Andersons over for a super awesome new years party. Well as awesome as someone with no sleep could have had. ;) I had fun.... I am not sure about everyone else!