A New Year

We celebrated New Years Eve with just our little family.  And I am perfectly happy with that.  It is nice to spend time with just us.  Now that our kids have gotten older we no longer feel so sad without our extended family.  Sure it is nice to be with them, but we have so much fun with just us. I made some appetizers and treats and we rented some movies. Then we counted down for New York New Years. We tired the real new years a couple of years ago and vowed to never do that again.  The girls are okay knowing it's not the real thing.  We did a balloon drop and had poppers, it was fun.  Russ of course is too young to stay up, maybe in a couple years. Kevy was even a good sport and wore the New Years hat with the girls.

 The next morning we thought we would make a new tradition and go out to breakfast which was fun.

 The girls have been begging us to go up to the snow and we haven't done it each year we have been here, so we decided that we had to do it.  Big mistake to do it on New Years Day.  Everyone else in Northern California was thinking the same thing as us.  We got off on the exit where there is a good sledding hill but it was packed and they wouldn't let us park.  We noticed some people parking on the onramp so we thought why not. So we parked and got the kids all bundled up.  As we got to the top of the hill we saw a sign that said no parking, tow zone so we decided even though there were a lot of other cars doing it, we just don't have that good of luck and we would be the ones to get towed.  So we drove up to the next exit.  It wasn't nearly as packed, but there also wasn't any place to sled.  The girls were okay with that though.

 I was planning on just staying in the car with Russ because after the 10 minutes we spent at the other spot he seemed like he was all snowed out.  But after a few minutes he wanted to get out and be with the girls.

 They had fun just walking around and playing in the snow.

 They made some snow angels, and Janie was glad that we had made her wear the snow pants.  Since we haven't been in the cold in three years we didn't really have any clothes for the bigger girls to wear and they just had to wear their jeans.  Janie wanted to be like them and not wear the snow pants we had for her because "sisters aren't wearing them!" So funny. She always wants to be just like her sisters.

 Russ was funny because he didn't want to wear his mittens and kept taking them off.  Then he would touch the snow with his bare hands and start crying because it hurt them.  Silly guy, he kept doing this over and over.

We accomplished what I was hoping for with this little trip.  The girls keep saying how sad they are that they don't get to live in a place where it snows.  Well they have changed their tune after playing in the snow for a day.  They had lots of fun, but froze to death and had a hard time getting warm.  They now are glad we live in a place where it doesn't  snow, but that we can go and visit the snow if we want. Yay!