Washington Snow

We had a marvelous trip to Washington for Christmas, and I am finally getting a chance to sit down and blog about it. I am going to blog about this trip in segments, so this is the first one.

When we arrived in Washington, the weather was unusually cold. The temperature was in the teens and twenties (when usually at this time of year it is thirties and forties), and we were getting snow!!! This however caused for what we felt like was a snow in. Washington usually does not get this much snow, so they are not always prepared for the roads to be plowed (if this had of been Utah, it would not have been as big of a deal). Thus, for the first few days we felt snowed in. There was lots of slipping on the roads, and several accidents, and numerous near-accidents (of which my family was involved in several- SCARY!!). We felt very blessed that the lives of those we care about most were perserved (the scariest near-accident was accounted for on my sister's blog on this post).

However, there was some good due to the snow, it meant that Lydia got her first change to PLAY in the snow!! Here is her first adventure (caught on camera) out to stand in the snow.

Don't you love the boots?! Suzee found them at a thrift store for a buck!! Lydia absolutely LOVED them. For the majority of our trip, the boots were the shoes of choice to wear around the house, outside, and if we would have let her, to bed.

Then, on a different day, Lydia and I got to play in the snow. We tried to build a snowman, but we didn't have the right gloves for Lydia, and she just didn't really want to touch the snow, so we tried sledding. She definitely enjoyed that! We found that our makeshift sled of a cookie sheet worked great on the little slopes in my parents backyard. She had so much fun being outside that when it was time to come in she didn't want to go!! Good old hot chocolate does the trick though. Later in the week Jeff went and played in the snow with Lydia too. I'm not quite sure who had more fun, Lydia, or Jeff.

Here are pictures of me and Lydia playing in the snow. Thanks to my brother Ryan for being our photographer!
At first we used a plastic cutting board as our sled, but it didn't work quite as well as the cookie sheet. Look at that smile!





Jeff was able to get these magnificent pictures of Mt. Rainier one morning. Doesn't it look beautiful with all of the snow?



The first Sunday we were there, was pretty eventful. The night before calls had gone out saying that church was going to be cancelled because of the snow, but there was a possibility that if the stake president felt the roads were good enough to travel on, there would be a 3 ward combined sacrament meeting in our building. We woke expecting no church, and started off preparing a lazy breakfast when we got the call that there would be sacrament meeting! And then the slow morning became a whirlwind! The men were shoveling snow in our driveway and that of a home teaching family, and then went to the church building to help prepare the parking lot for the meeting. We hastily dressed and helped mom field phone calls and make phone calls. It was a crazy morning, but the meeting was wonderful. University Place is a fairly close nit community, so it was fun to see all of our friends from the other wards. Below is a picture of the amount of snow that we had that morning. This is Jeff measuring it before we were getting ready to leave for church. I believe that it measures at 4 inches. Crazy!!

So, that is it for our first segment of a Washington Christmas, our crazy snow adventures. Hopefully I'll be able to get the rest of our trip blogged this week, so keep coming back!