Sunday, January 25, 2009

Ice Rink! (pictures and video)

It's here! After many hours of cold, hard work, our backyard ice rink is up and functional! We are having lots of fun, especially Valerie, Stephanie, and I. We three have used it almost every day. It's 35 x 45 sq. ft. We thought it was funny to tell people that we used buckets to fill it, but actually we used hoses. (More than one because our back faucet stopped working for some reason.) We were very careful to not let water freeze in them.

Chris putting some water in the rink.


A couple kids out on the ice. Closer zoom-up from the same day.










It's great having our own private rink. You can do anything from "change direction whenever you want" to, what else, square dance! :) (Sorry for anyone who can't watch the below video... it's not too amazing :P)

Friday, January 2, 2009

Holidays, 2008 style


I hope you all had a great Christmas! We did, except for a few incidents of the "24 hr" flu. (Who knew that Dad and Chris both have a tendency to black out when they vomit?) This year, my parents' gift to us kids was a trip to the Creation Museum in Kentucky! We went there last spring on the way to Florida and really enjoyed it. Going again at this time of year was great because we could see all the Christmas extras... the live Nativity (above picture), the lights in the gardens, and my favorite - the special "Christmas Star" planetarium show. Plus they have a petting zoo now... no dinosaurs, but there's a camel and a zonkey/zedonk (never found out which one it was) .
















For New Year's Eve we did our yearly tradition of everyone making a batch of cookies. (Yes, ladies and gentlemen, that's 10 batches of cookies.) This year I made Cookie Dough Truffles (basically balls of chocolate chip cookie dough dipped in chocolate.. really good if not strictly "cookies"). New Year's Day we did our tradition of donut snowmen... it's quite a junk-food holiday for us, LOL.Hope you all had happy healthy holidays! Thank you Jesus for being the reason for the season!