Where to Begin

Busy, busy, busy.  Finally a break to sit down and let you know all that has been happening with the James clan.  The question now is where to begin.  I think I will start with about nine days ago - Christian's birthday party.

Christian is a young boy from church who invited us to attend his ninth birthday party which was being held at Icicle Junction in Leavenworth.  Icicle Junction is our mini version of Chuckie Cheese.  Cheryl, Christian's mom, had several games planned for the kids to play in the party room, lunch to eat, and then everyone got tokens to play all the arcade games they could and rack up as many tickets as possible so that they could "buy" toys at the ticket counter.

At the junction is also Leavenworth's own theatre.  I figured that while we were there it would be fun to see the latest Narnia movie so I purchased tickets and the kids and I with Todd saw the movie.  While all of this was going on snow was dumping outside.  In fact, in that four hours that we were at the junction about a foot of snow fell outside. 

When we got home Todd got busy shoveling our driveway and three other neighbor's driveways.  Five hours later he was still working and the snow was still falling although now it was turning into rain.  For the next thirty six hours after dumping over 14 inches of snow it rained.  The light fluffy snow turned to thick, heavy, wet snow.  It was a mess but beautiful.

The kids are having a blast with all of the snow.  Their snow forts are getting bigger and bigger every day.  With all of this new snow the boys built a second fort on the other side of the house.  Then last week bulldozers came through town to remove all of the snow build up  that was lining all of the streets and blocking all of the street parking.  The dozers scooped up the excess snow and dumped a huge pile of it in our yard.  I am talking a pile that is about 10 feet high.  My boys were drooling with excitement.  It was all I could do to get them to finish their schoolwork before they headed outside to build the fort of all forts.  This massive snow pile now has tunnels running through it and is quite the master piece. 

So this was the start of our busy time - birthday parties, snow, but that is not all.....