Van Osdol's: White Christmas

Once Mom and Dad arrived safely a day earlier than planned, we let ourselves get excited about the predicted blizzard bringing 22” snow! Each day Andrew and the kids spent at least 2 hours (sometimes 4!) outside enjoying the winter wonderland.

My family does well being snowed in and took advantage of the plethora of opportunity for games, puzzles, movies, and of course our favorites, eating and sleeping!

Dad had his second cornea transplant a few months before the holidays. The second procedure seems to be taking longer to heal and Dad alternates between having a super sensitive and sore eye. Here is a pic of Stevie Ray and his girl…

“Uhhh, durrhh.” That’s about all the conversation you get here.

Once we decided to buy our Christmas tree, Vermillion was plum sold out of trees. On to WalMart we trudged to scope out our options…. Of course the tree I feel in love with was ridiculously expensive and knowing that it would be at least half that in a couple weeks, we decided the nice tree was a no-go this year. We compromised and checked out the cheapest 6’ artificial tree in stock (which turned out to be only 6’ according to a fisherman's calculations!). Deciding the kids could have it in their room after we move, we bought the slightly ridiculous looking tree…

Christmas Eve, per tradition, we opened Grandma Maloney’s presents!

Christmas morning we all surprised ourselves and slept until 9am! Elizabeth was completely shocked by the toys in her stocking! She ran upstairs yelling at me, “Mom, I WAS a good girl this year!” Elizabeth and Alexander are really the perfect age for gift giving… they don’t get distracted and play with just the boxes and at the same time, each present is THE BEST! It was fun watching them get so excited over each gift.

Mike and Sam conveniently “forgot” Rusty’s squeaky toy in Rapid during their last visit… Lucky for Rusty, his Grandpa was thoughtful enough to wrap it up and bring it as a Christmas present. The dang toy is so annoying, your ears start ringing after the first 5 seconds! Rusty was so excited you’d think it would’ve been more difficult for us to “misplace” the adored toy… but it wasn’t! Thanks Andrew for making it disappear.

Had to include this picture to show Aunt Barb just how excited Mom was for her Black Hills Gold bracelet… :) Wonder why I have such exaggerated expressions? I love it!

“The turkey keeps leaking on me!”

The snow was a continuous distraction for the boys… Is it really my fault that the shrimp and deviled eggs were gone once you decided to stop playing? Oh, stop feeling sorry for them... I hid some in the fridge!

It was fun documenting the snow accumulations with the drift in front of our dining room window. Sarah texted us that it was snowing in Texas and proceeded to send a picture of a slight sprinkling of snow alongside her sidewalk…. We responded with this picture:

Her response, at least the edited version, was that she’d never live in in South Dakota again.

This is the drift that Mom, Dad and I watched Andrew take the kids to the top and, after he pushed Alex off on the sled, hollered out, “Be Careful!” Being his fathers son, at the bottom he stood up with a big grin on his face and yelled, “again!”

And the snow kept coming…

….and coming!

Mom, Dad, and I stayed inside for most of the weekend. Early in the holiday we decided we should do a puzzle since it’d been forever since we’d all done one. Dad went to the store and debated between a 3-D glow-in-the-dark tiger and the “simple” cabin scene. Mom scoffed his decision, informing him that the cabin puzzle would be simple and complete in no time. In fact, she thinks we might even have time to put together the tiger puzzle too..…..not so much! We stayed up super late every night trying so hard to complete the puzzle before they had to leave just so mom wouldn’t eat all of her words! Forgot to take a picture before I started putting it away but here is a good portion of the puzzle we spent hours over.