In our mountain home . . .

Sure it may be cold (not intolerable, mind you) in our neck of the woods, but I defy any one of my blog readers to find any sight so lovely as that in the first photo. And this hill which we tubed down was pretty much in our back yard. We would have walked there if we hadn't needed to get tubes and other gear before we embarked on our tubing outing. Yep -eat your hearts out with jealousy! :D hahaha
p.s. Pretty awesome photo of Dietrich's face plant, eh? Nice thing was it didn't upset him in the slightest. He just kept on going down the hill, and still solo. What a guy!

Christmas gift

Thanks to Grandmother and Granddad Allred, Dietrich and Kate have been able to learn the skills of air hockey. :D Fun!

Big girl . . .

Kate's hair is getting so long that I had to try doing something with it, just b/c I can! This was the result of my work. :D She's just as adorable in pigtails as she is in curls! Ack! And Dietrich just really enjoys getting his picture taken - plus it was motivation for him to get dressed. If it was up to him he'd be in pj's all day.

Happy New Year's!

I love how it's the middle of January and I'm finally posting the pics from our New Year's party. :D As you can see our party included a pinata (which was strongly constructed - that's why David had to help break it), glowsticks, and you might be able to see traces of chocolate on one or both of our children's faces. That would be from our chocolate fountain. :) After the kids were in bed David and I started on a puzzle while we waited for the midnight hour. We saw no ball drop (in the mountains you only get TV if you pay for it) but we did stay up 'til just past midnight. That might be the first time that it's happened for awhile. :) Frankly, our year has started out somewhat poorly with a couple of unexpected inconveniences, however it could be much worse. And we still have each other and our kids, so life is still pretty good overall.

Allred Christmas, vol. 3

Over the river and through the woods . . . we went to Preston on Christmas day and mainly spent time at my family's house for the few days we were there. My mother has a bunch of themed rooms with toys to go with pretty much every one. I don't know exactly what these are for, but my kids sure enjoyed them! Aren't my kids cute? :)

Allred Christmas, vol. 2

Because of technical difficulties these are the only pics we have of Christmas day. What technical difficulties you ask? Well, after the kids had gone to bed Christmas Eve, I went downstairs to make some final preparations for the big day. I walked into my kitchen and noticed that the floor made this odd squishing sound when I stepped on it. So I called David downstairs to check out this odd phenomenon. He apparently had noticed it earlier, but it wasn't that bad and he thought maybe just some spilled water had gotten in between the floor boards. He looked for the source of the "flood" and found that our furnace had sprung a leak. We have a guy who works on heating systems in our ward so we gave him a call. Busted valve in the furnace. Moved the stove so we could pull up some floorboards, the heating guy said he'd fix it Monday and in the meantime lend us a big fan to help dry out our floor. Not long after he leaves the power goes out. And it stays out ALL NIGHT! Into the next morning too. David assembled the kids' "Santa gift" by lantern light. Christmas morning was freezing, and I couldn't make our Christmas breakfast of pancakes with pudding and berries for lack of power and a functional stove. Luckily the kids are good with cheerios any given day. We had previously planned to go to Preston Christmas day anyway, but we waited awhile to see if the power would come on so that David wouldn't have to disconnect the garage door opener to get our car out. Power came on for a little bit. David opened the garage door and loaded our vehicle. The power went off again. David starts worrying again about having to disconnect the garage door opener, but the power came on again and we decided we'd better get out of town before the power goes off again! Which we later found out it did. There was a 17-hour blackout in our area (Hailey, Ketchum, Gooding, Carey). It was a pretty big blackout. Several areas are apparently on the same grid. Yikes! So even though David and I had no breakfast at least we did get to go home to Preston and get some good food. What a crazy Christmas, huh? And this week our ward relief society is having a meeting about "preparedness". Nothing like a real emergency to find out how prepared you are/are not. (p.s. If we'd had propane that we could find, we could have cooked our Christmas breakfast on our propane camp stove) HAHAHAHA

Allred Christmas, vol. 1

Whoa! How's that for an intimidating title? It won't really be that long. :D Our Christmas Eve included a little trek to Sun Valley for the annual Christmas Eve celebration. It's free; and it included the Nutcracker on Ice, a torchlight skiers parade down Dollar Mountain, and fireworks! Sounded like something we couldn't miss. And besides the fact that it was really cold and Kate was unreasonably grumpy it didn't disappoint.
After we went home Dietrich and Kate got their Christmas Eve pj's. Amazing how something so simple thrills a kid so much isn't it?