I'm excited to have the New Year here. December was a crazy month for me and January is going to be very intense due to the Stake activities of the Young Women. I hope to keep my sanity by journaling, sketching, painting and knitting.
One of Stan's Christmas presents is a skiiing/snowboarding trip in February (at Badger Pass in Yosemite). We have the reservations for the lodge (YAY!). Katie's gift was for one of the nights and my mom's gift was for the second night. The lift tickets and rentals are only $35 per day, if you stay in the park's facilities for two nights. Shane and I got Stan setup with new clothes and some gear for skiing/snowboarding - since his stuff is from the 80s. It was time for an update!! Now all the Sierras need is more snow - so I'm doing the snow dance, which is kinda like the rain dance. The long term forecasts aren't favorable so I'm hoping they're wrong! If the conditions aren't good for skiing, we'll go anyways and enjoy ourselves in other ways.
It was awesome to have both sons, Shane and Ryan, come up for Christmas. Our oldest son, Scott is in Texas and we miss him. We hope he can join us for skiing in February. The weather provided an icy white Christmas which was really cool. Ryan had never been in falling snow so he was able to run around and take pictures. It made things a little more "homey". If the wind hadn't been blowing the snow sideways, it might have been even more enjoyable - but hey... at least we got some "white" in our Christmas. The boys had to go home Christmas evening for two reasons: they both had to work the day after Christmas AND we wanted them to get out of Dodge before Cal Trans closed the 58 freeway!
On December 30th, we went for a ride that took us from Jawbone Canyon to Kelso Valley up toward the Piute Mountains in Sequoia National Forest. It was the same ride that we took back in October with other families from the ward but Katie had to work then, so we thought this would be fun to do. There were patches of snow in Kelso Valley and we couldn't make it all the way up to the Sequoia NF boundary due to too much snow. We said we'd make it as far as we could. It was a lot of fun. Of course we had to stop for a snowball fight!
This past Sunday, (drum roll) a certain son bore his testimony - for the first time in his 18 years. In fact, all four of us got up there. I was the last one so I knew that I had to complete the circle. It was very special.
So I hope everyone has a blessed 2009.
