Ringing in the New Year

We had such a nice time at our home in Utah. We left Henderson on December 27 to head up north. We had heard that our little home town had received quite a bit of snowfall. If not for one of the townsfolk plowing our driveway, we wouldn't have been able to get to our house. The picture below was taken from our front porch. You can see the deer tracks in the snow in our front yard. The next picture was again taken from our front porch looking in another direction.The picture below was taken looking out our kitchen door. We couldn't get the screen door open because the snow was too deep, but the deep snow didn't deter the deer from frolicking in our yard at night.
Our brother and his wife and our two little nieces stopped by on the 28th on their way out of town. They were visiting with our sister-in-law's mom and dad. Her dad was our good Samaritan driveway-plower. Many thanks to him again. Our two little nieces are so darn cute. In our church, small children go to the nursery class from the time they're 18 months old to the January following their third birthday, and then they go to the Sunbeams class . Camille, our 3 1/2 year old niece, didn't want to leave the nursery program. She told her mother, "I'll be a lot of things for Jesus, but not a Sunbeam." When it was time for them to leave to head farther up north to their home, Camille told her mom that she wanted to stay with her Aunties forever, and she hid in the kitchen in hopes that her parents would forget about her. Her mom found her, of course, and told her to kiss and hug her Aunties goodbye. Camille told her mother, "I said I wanted to stay here forever; not kiss and hug them goodbye." We've got to admire her spunk. Her younger sister, McKenna, is every bit as adorable as Camille, but she doesn't talk as much to us. We pilfered the picture below of the girls from their mother's blog. It was taken this summer while we were in Disneyland.
Most of the days we were in Utah were spent working on our hobbies: Edie crochets and Sandy quilts. Below is a picture of the baby blanket that Edie finished while we were in Utah.

And this is a picture of the quilt and dust ruffle that Sandy made for her bed in our Utah home. She finished this quilt when we were in Utah over Thanksgiving. She started working on another quilt during this visit.

We did take a break from our crocheting and quilting to go outside on Tuesday to break up the ice at the bottom of our driveway. We had a little difficulty getting up our driveway when we arrived in town the evening of the 27th. The tires on Edie's car spun on the ice. She had to put the car in reverse and then gun it to get over the very slick ice. Fortunately, our driveway isn't too short, so we didn't gun the car through the back of the garage. We also wanted to make sure the driveway was as ice-free as possible, because on Wednesday we were planning to go up north a ways to a larger town that actually has stores so we could do a little shopping. Other than those two brief excursions out of our home, we just relaxed and sewed and crocheted (and did a little cleaning--very little, and not our idea of relaxation). We weren't looking forward to coming back to Henderson, but we're here nonetheless, and we're looking forward to the next time we visit our other home.