Merry (belated) Christmas!

Chad and I have had a great holiday season so far. We spent the weekend before Christmas with my parents in Lodi. We stayed with my grandma and were able to celebrate the holiday with my aunts, uncles and cousins. Christmas Eve we drove to my parents' house for the night before heading down to San Diego for four days. In San Diego we visited Chad's parents, sisters, brothers, their spouses and our nieces and nephews. We played lots of games and had a good time. Below you'll see a photo of the result of one of our games. The group was divided into two teams: Chad's team and Sean's team. Chad's dad bought two pair of old fashioned one-piece red pajama thingies (I have no idea what they're called). Chad and Sean had to put them on and everyone else on their teams had to blow up balloons and stuff them in their suits. Let's just say I don't think I've laughed that hard in a really long time.

Stormy Weather

Today has been quite a weather day in the Valley. We've had rain on and off with some thunder and lightening too. Pretty exciting, really, and especially good when you can stay home and not have to drive or walk around in it. As of this post we've had four unique hail storms and each left a fair amount of ice in our planters. In fact, the hail from our last storm, about 3 hours ago, is still on the ground. Brrr.

Night at the Cabin

Saturday Chad and I drove up to the cabin for the night. It started lightly snowing about 35 minutes into our 50 minute drive. I'm glad I wasn't driving. We made it safely to the cabin and all was good. Chad immediately started a fire and I made grilled cheese sandwiches. About two hours after we settled in the power went out! Fortunately we found candles and flashlights and it was still relatively light outside. The outage only lasted about an hour and we sat close to the fire to stay warm. The snow continued to fall well into the evening and the view from inside the cabin was beautiful.

Candies

My mom came up earlier in the week for the night to do a little shopping and baking. Overall I think we were pretty successful. We made chocolate-covered pretzels, rocky road, caramels and ginger snaps.

Friday Chad took the red tray of goodies to his coworkers. That night we delivered the candies and cookies to our friends and neighbors.

Here's a photo of me hand-rolling the caramels.