Pre-Christmas Stuff

So, like most of the country, it seems, we are buried under snow. It couldn't get warm enough fast enough for us to not have a white Christmas. But more on the snow later.

I took a couple pictures earlier this week and knew I sorely needed to do a blog update. So I pulled the memory card out of the camera tonight so I could upload pictures. When I stuck the card in the slot on the front of the computer the little green light didn't come on.

Uh oh.

The computer didn't recognize or read the card for some reason. I tried all sorts of complicated, technical stuff to make the computer recognize the card. I pulled it out and then put it back in. I did that again. And a third time. I pulled it out, blew canned air into the slot and onto the card. I pulled it out, sighed, and set it aside while I went and did some browsing.

About twenty minutes later I tried again. The little green light came on this time! But the computer still didn't want to recognize the memory card. So I finally resorted to restarting the computer and that seemed to work.

At the beginning of November I got a gingerbread house kit from work. We sell them there and then people can turn them back in for coupons to the restaurant. They're then displayed and voted on for a contest. But we didn't turn ours back in. I just got one because I figured Sydney would like making it. And she did.



Sydney got that apron from one of Grandma M's friends. She made it especially for Sydney.



We all helped make the gingerbread house a little bit and it turned out pretty well, I think.



There are a couple more pictures of the finished house over at the online photo album.

A week or two ago Sydney came to the conclusion (with the help of Mommy and Daddy) that she didn't need to eat in a high chair anymore. She either eats from her booster chair at the table or from one of the high stools at the kitchen counter. (We're going to need to buy a third stool.)



Over the last several weeks Anne has been making Christmas cookies. Sydney has been helping. She really enjoys standing on the step stool and helping Mommy measure out, pour in and mix up the ingredients. She helps cleaning up, too.



So late last Tuesday night it started to snow. It was off and on at first. Then a switch got flipped and someone forgot to turn it off again. It kept snowing. And snowing. And snowing. And about 36 hours later it finally stopped. For a little while.



That picture was taken sometime Wednesday morning, I think. Long before the snow stopped. But you can already see how it was piling up - even under the patio cover. Yay!

I'm not sure what the records were, exactly, but they say we set records for the amount of snow that fell in a 24-hour period. For this area it was the most snow at one time since, um, sometime in the early-1900s, I think. It might have been the late-1800s. It was over 100 years, but I don't remember how much over 100 years.

Anne said on the news Thursday they said the small city where we live got 29 inches. The city where I work (slightly higher elevation) got 37 inches.

One nice thing that came out of all the snow is that our bird feeder finally got a visitor. We got the feeder back in early November. Since Sydney likes looking out the front window and she's always excited to see an animal I figured she'd like to watch a bird feeder. Of course, it was a little late in the season to set it up, probably. Most of the birds were gone for the winter and the ones sticking around didn't know it was there so it'd be chance that would bring them around.

And just by chance we got a ton of snow dumped on us and a bird found our feeder.



I believe it's just a little sparrow, but I don't know birds that well. And it only seems to be that one bird that comes back to eat the seeds. We have yet to see more than one bird at the feeder at a time.

And tonight we're getting more snow. The temperature hasn't been above 20°F in two weeks now. (If it has it hasn't been much above it.) And many of those days (like today) we have a nice arctic wind blowing in that takes the windchill well into the negatives.

We had another three or four inches of snow between last night and today. And now we have another winter weather advisory for tonight and they're calling for six to eight more inches overnight. What a fun winter this has been so far. I can hardly wait to see what the next three months bring us!

I won't wait as long for the next update. I promise. I'll be doing a post-Christmas post by next Sunday at the latest, I think. Plus I have videos off Anne's cell phone. She's been bugging me for several months to put those on the blog. So there are two posts right there.

Oh, and for anyone interested, potty training is pretty much finished. Sydney is in underwear all the time, even when going out, except at night when she wears a pull-up. She goes to the bathroom on her own, both pee and poop. (We still have to help her wipe poopies.) And even though she has some potty stickers left she rarely ever puts them up anymore. Sometimes if she's upstairs she will, but I think most the time she wants to get back to playing or doing whatever she was doing before she went potty.