Last of 2014

Happy New Year!! Well, in a few hours anyway. We are headed out soon but wanted to do a quick post. We have had the craziest weather as of late and have moved from rain to very cold. We have been in the 30's through the night and most of the morning, though we are reaching 50 still in the day, it seems quite cold to us. Today, as most of you know, is my birthday. Last night we went on a date and left the girls with Nana for the night. It is one of my days for the chores so Nana invited me over to eat breakfast after I was done - presumably to pick up the girls - and she had the table all set up in a cute surprise party for me. It was sweet and the girls really thought it was fun! My favorite gift was K's card - "To Mom, From your doters. I love you more than inything." I will be sad when she can spell correctly!

Just for fun, this is what it looks like from our porch, looking down over our driveway.  The tiny brown things at the bottom right are some of our horses and the area off to the left is the arena.

Bike rides are a bonus now that we have working 'bikes' and our favorite spot is the Sundial Bridge, which connects to the River Trail.

All of the trees have lost their leaves.  It looks dead, but if we cold only see the life forming inside there, oh, how we would rejoice!

We have so much run-off from the rain that the river is brown.

K made a Toothless outfit for Emily...complete with wings, broken side of the tail and face mask.

On one of those days when I was about to have a breakdown from being inside too long, we took off on a hike, regardless of the cold.  It was cold!  Still in the 30's when we started and windy.  If we had clothes, it would not be a problem, but seeing as we have been in socal for so long, we do not have jackets for this.  We were good for a while, but Em got cold and we headed back, though we got three miles out of them.

We found a frozen mountain lion paw print and decided the ice crystals crossing through it made it cool enough to post.

The trail is still set up for rain, though we don't have that anymore.  :-)

Em got so cold we dressed her like a Ninja and played pretend the whole way back.  They actually did have a good time!

We then decided to check out the skating rink and let the girls have a go at it.  It was not even real ice!  What a crock!  It was some sort of a plastic and you could not push off so all you could do was walk and fall.  I hated it.  But, K was having such a fun time that I stayed with her and pretended I thought it was great.  What else are mom's for?  We didn't let Em try...for obvious medical reasons.

As a consolation prize, the girls got to feed the birds at Turtle Bay...pretty fun consolation prize!

Another year comes to a close.  Another year of health in our books, sold to me.  I pray next year brings rhythm and joy, peace and health.  God is good and will always be good, regardless of what happens; I just hope we can put ourselves aside long enough to experience this truth.

May God bless your New Year!! Now I am off to muck the stalls!  :-)

Merry Christmas!

Merry Christmas!! Now, before you think that I found time on Christmas day to update the blog, remember that M works today, so we did Christmas two days ago. I was way too exhausted to do anything that night! :-) We had a wonderful Christmas that we all thoroughly enjoyed, but before that we had the kids' Christmas show at church. Our girls were angels...if only they knew!  :-)

Emily was so serious that M and I sat there laughing the entire time.  She is so rarely serious that to be this serious about a song caught my funny bone.

Christmas Eve we went over to Nana and Papa's for a lovely dinner and to open stockings.

And then it was Christmas morning.  One more year and I will let them start the tradition in our house of sleeping under the tree.  I used to LOVE that.  We would leave the lights on all night and sleep in the glow of the joy of the morning.  For now, it is their beds, in matching pajamas.

They got some really cool stuff this year!  From barns,

To My Little Pony, (yes, M photo-bombed that on purpose),

To How to Train Your Dragon Two,

(Sammy still gets to be a part of it)

To new 'bikes',

And a bigger, better playhouse...they got it all!  Thanks to all our Aunts and Uncles, Nanas and Poppys, they had a blast!

Poppy found this in someone's backyard all beat up and nasty and decided just to ask if they wanted it anymore.  They did not and Poppy got a steal of a deal!  One day of transport and cleaning by my uncle, M, and my Dad, and these girls have a playhouse to die for.

It came with the Melissa and Doug kitchen, the table and chairs, all the benches and chairs on the outside, a billion plastic toys and more than we can track.  Yes, that is a fancy light running on real electricity.  An adult can even stand up inside there!  K just kept walking around going, "This is so awesome!"  It was cute.

We decided on trikes with bike wheels for the girls because since we arrived Emily has not stopped asking for us to go and buy her trike back.  We have such steep hills here that she tips over and falls when she rides her bike.  Plus, she is just too short for the ones we have.  Anyway, we needed something they could ride and not tip over but could grip the ground (no plastic wheels since they just spin out on hills and don't go anywhere).  So, we found these. They seem happy with them as we are no longer pressuring them to learn to ride bikes.  :-)

Emily, who is generally incapable of playing on her own, chose this morning to go outside and play by herself in the 40 degree weather, just so she could ride and play in her house.  She stayed out for a good hour and a half before she came in shaking violently from the cold.  I got some school done with Kylie so it was a win-win.

After a little time to play, we headed up to Mt Shasta to play in the snow.  After all this rain, we knew it was going to be covered.  The girls didn't even wait for us to get up to Bunny Flats, they just started climbing the snow bank next to the car.

This guy was parked in the parking lot.  He is traveling around the US in his car, something M and his college buddies did 'back in the day', and wants to start a business showing others how to do it too.  Love the tent on the truck!  Love that mountain in the background!!

Mt Shasta is a 14,000ft mountain up here. When we lived here before, M and I summitted it three times with different people.  It's a beast to climb (just ask Mark - well, he made it up just fine, it was coming down that ripped some of his skin off).  But I digress. On this day, we just wanted to play in its shadow.  We drove up to Bunny Flats at about 7000ft.  We introduced K to real sledding on real snow.  She loved it...though she has a nice owie on her chin to prove it.  She got bounced off on one ride and scrapped her chin on the snow.  She was so tough (highly unusual for her) that I didn't think she had really hurt herself until we got home and I could see the size of the scab forming.  She may be tough some day!!  Regardless, she had a blast.  

Then it was off to building a snowman.

And constantly sinking knee and thigh deep into the snow.

For a moment a cloud covered us but left the mountain in sunlight.  To the eye, it was spectacular!

M and I went for a shot and almost fell over and then decided that would make a funnier picture anyway.

We had fun.  It's nice to see M laughing again!  He is slowly relaxing as we live here longer.  Our friends who visited in November could already see the change in him.  Now I just need to follow suit.

After a couple hours, Em finally decided she was comfortable in her new environment and agreed to go sledding.  Of course, she went with me first as she could not trust anyone else, but once we went a couple of times, then she was brave enough to go with Daddy.

As you can see, she hated it.

And then it was Poppy...because once she got started, there was no stopping.  We finally had to tell her it was time to go.  We found Dad and Kylie making snow angels and headed home.

This is Black Butte.  They say that God made Mt Shasta and it was so beautiful and majestic that Satan had to try to make one too.  His attempt is a small, black cinder cone in exactly the same shape as Mt Shasta, but tiny and, well, black.

When we got home, there was one more present waiting...if you haven't seen How to Train Your Dragon Two, then you have no idea that this is an awesome Astrid outfit.  K hasn't taken it off in three days.

The reason we had to come back early from the mountain was for a meeting with one of the county supervisors who had taken up our case with the county in hopes of helping us out.  It went GREAT!  If you recall, the remodel has been held up because of permitting issues with other buildings on the rest of our property (apparently they were unpermitted, though they have been assessed and taxed for 20-30 years).

Anyway, they would not let us have the permit for my parent's apartment until we had permits for everything else and that was going to cost us money and time. Well, without getting into too much detail, after almost four months of fighting, in one fail swoop, all we have to do is expand our septic system and the permit is ours!  Maybe, just maybe, we will get my parents moved in downstairs and feel like we are settled and can move forward..some day!

Bottom line: God is good.  I know I didn't go into detail, but if you could see it all, you would agree that this is a straight and pure miracle He worked out for us.  He saved us money, time and frustration, got us moving forward again, and gave us enough time to re-look at all our options so we would know for sure this is the way we want to go. It's not every Christmas you get a physical, worldly gift straight from God, but we sure did this year!

Have a wonderful rest of your year!  God Bless!