Cold Weather Activities

Yesterday morning we woke up with two very snotty kids and decided that people at church wouldn't appreciate us bringing them and possibly getting their kids sick so we stayed home and had a quite morning.  Chase and Joanna have been acting normally and besides the runny noses and bad morning coughs seem to be feeling just fine.  After I laid them down for their naps I made the terrible decision to go out and try to finish my Christmas shopping.  I took Katy with me of course.  On the way to the mall I thought to myself, "huh, there's hardly any traffic, I bet every one's at home and it won't be crowded at all."  ha ha, well the reason why there were no cars on the road was because they were all in the mall parking lot!  It was horribly crowded and insane, who said there was a recession?!  Well I ended up being out for 4 hours and only went to 2 stores, and nearly had a melt down.  I got most of the stuff I need but still need to go one more time, I'm hoping to go first thing tomorrow morning and hope I beat the crowds... wish me luck.  I really hate shopping and usually only do it online but I was really behind this year and actually had to physically go and do it, boo!  Serves me right for procrastinating, I suppose :P

So I got home last night just in time to watch the last 5 minutes of the Eagles game, which was the best part anyway, and then I went to get us dinner from Slice of Italy.  After we ate we bundled up the kids real good and took them to Ricky's friend's house to ice skate on their pond.  His friend was one of Ricky's old hockey teammates.  It was the first time Chase was on ice skates on ice and he did really good!

He just shuffled back and forth on the pond and hardly fell at all.  A couple times I pulled him around so he could go faster but he had a blast.  He couldn't stop grinning and I, of course, was extremely proud of him.

Ricky even got his skates on and zipped around the ice like nobodies business :)

Princess Jo thought she didn't want to walk around the ice so I pulled her around on this little sled for about an hour and a half until she got too cold and we went inside to warm up.

Katy was asleep most of the time in the Ergo.

We got home around 7:30 and I made everyone hot chocolate to warm up.

["mom, stop taking my picture."]

you can't see it in this picture but she had a chocolate beard.

This morning I couldn't resist taking a ton of pictures of Katy.  She was so happy and had her cute little outfit on so I just went nuts :)

Love the flower butt!

Mishti is inside now, waiting to have her puppies.  I can't believe we are going to have two litters at once, yikes!  I don't think she's going to have a big litter though, probably only one or two.  I need to go get her a new kennel tonight.  I had gotten one for her but it's too small.

Blondie's litter is getting stronger and bigger every day.  They are so cute, Chase wants to hold them all the time.  They should open their eyes any day now.

Oh and if you are looking for a good indoor activity, here's a good one for you:

What silly monkeys :)

I heard on the news this morning that there is a stomach bug and pink eye "going around" so now I am officially scared to go anywhere before Christmas.  Yuck, that would be horrible.  We are now chewing our vitamins like they're going out of style.

Today I made a huge pile of venison jerky.  I used 5lbs of meat!  Hopefully it lasts us a while, it took me a while to start it this morning because I kept having to stop and feed Katy or take care of another little one, or two ;) but I finally got it in the dehydrator and started by 11:00am.  I just pulled it out at 9:30pm!

Please excuse the grainy cell phone picture... that's a lot of Jerky!

I'm hoping to get a lot done tomorrow but trying not to set my hopes too high :)