A little of This and a little of That.

Some snippets from our last week include Alicia's first ballroom dancing competition.  She has been going early before school for the last three months, and I've often caught her practicing her dances in the kitchen.  So fun to see her dancing with her friends.

She's the one right in the middle -
 second one over from the right.

   Here she is the one on the far right.

Sorry, I know the picture below is blurry, but I loved that Natalie and Megan joined in on the dancing fun behind the scenes. 

Changing gears a bit - last week we had a massive snow storm that swept through and dumped nearly two feet of snow.  They cancelled school, a first for us in all the years our girls have been attending school here.  

Trust me when I say they were fabulous at getting the word out.  At 6 a.m. we not only got a call from the district on our home phone, but on John's and my cell phone, not to mention the emails we both had in our accounts.  Being that it is such an unprecedented event to cancel school around here, I guess they figured we weren't getting up to listen to the radio to check on the school day's status.  I certainly wasn't planning too.  We were just going to huff it over to school on foot - given that the school is only a half mile away, if that. 

So what did we do on a no-school snow day?  We made homemade ice-cream of course.  That is, we did so after spending most of the morning shoveling ourselves out and sledding on the neighbors driveway.  It was quite the party with all of my neighbors out as we chatted and drank hot chocolate provided by my lovely neighbor. 

 P.S.  If you're wondering how to make homemade snow, you get a nice-sized bowl of fresh snow (Natalie just put two bowls outside as the snow was falling, and waited for it to be full), then you add about a cup of milk, a smidgen of vanilla, some sugar - I think it was about 1/4 cup, and whatever additions you want, like m&ms, chocolate chips, or marshmallows.  Tasty.


On another note, we spent time up at John's folks for Sunday dinner, and as you can see, the cousins LOVE their Uncle Kevin.  

 They even love playing with all the dress ups.  It was quite cute watching Megan try to stand, not to mention the walking part of things in these high heeled babies.  Good thing she's starting young.  I didn't learn how to walk in heels until well into my married years.

And lastly, Kimberly, Alicia and I made it up skiing on Saturday in the frigid-cold, 2-degree weather, but let me tell you, all of that fresh snow made skiing absolutely incredible!!  I didn't even mind my nose hairs freezing in place.  Not one bit.

Good thing Alicia was doing well enough in her skiing that we were able to advance to the gondola rather than riding up on the ski lifts in the biting cold.