Christmas Eve 2025

I love our bowling Christmas Eve tradition! It gets us out and doing something fun in the morning!

The kids came up with some creative names this year.

Still trying to go back to my glory days of my PE bowling class at BYU.

Ryan, ha ha!

The coolest bowling gang ever!

McKenna won the 6-7 award for bowling a 67!

She even did the hand gestures to go with it.

Mason also won for Most Strikes!

The "kids" table for lunch at Five Guys.

Christmas Eve at Grandma's is always so much fun!

I love our delicious Christmas Eve dinner though this year we learned that you can NOT transport cream corn and we definitely need smaller steaks. Sigh.

For several days we had been receiving all kids of goodies from friends and neighbors but the one I was most excited about was the box full of Laura's cookies. Apparently Cleo was just as excited about it because when we got home we found the empty box on the floor as well as several wrappers that had contained homemade bread. Next year all goodies are going on the counter, NOT at the edge of the table.

Yikes! A Snowstorm

Snow flakes had started falling during the Wreaths Across America ceremony and, by the time we drove home, the roads were getting a little icey and we slid a few times in David's car. We exchanged his car for mine and then headed out on what would become quite the journey to pick up Xander and Ashlyn from the Cincinnati airport. The roads were already getting pretty bad so we kept it slow. About a mile or so from the freeway entrance, my low tire pressure light came on. Ugh! Thank goodness there's a gas station near the entrance so we stopped there first to make sure all tires were good to go. Poor Xander and Ashlyn had to wait a little while at the airport because it was a slow drive for us. Thank goodness as we got closer to Cincinnati the roads started to improve! What a fun reunion to see these two!!

The drive home was quite the experience. As mentioned, the roads around Cincinnati were absolutely fine; I'm sure they did lots of prepping for the storm. But the further north we started to go, the roads got worse and worse. We saw many cars slip and slide all over the road. One guy even spun all the way around and then slid through several lanes and almost hit a semi. Thank goodness my car seemed to be handling the conditions pretty well.

Ashlyn and I hung out in the back, trying not to freak out!

And then came the moment when David decided to try and clear off the windshield wiper, rolled down the window, grabbed it...and it broke off! So now we were without a windshield wiper on his side with heavily falling snow. Eventually he was having such a hard time seeing that we were forced to get off and try and find an open auto store to get a new one. Once again, roads were horrible and parking lots had not been plowed. Heavenly Father was watching over us, though, and miracle of miracles, we found a store that was actually open and we got what we needed.

The final stretch!

It took us over two hours to get home but we made it! It was one of the most harrowing drives I've ever been on! It was so nice to be home at last! I just can't resist this little snow face Cleo!

And to have our Xander home for the next three weeks is absolutely the best!

The night time snow looked absolutely beautiful, almost as if little sparkling diamonds were scattered on the top!

The next morning it was time to dig out! We got about a foot of snow!

We've become quite the snow shoveling team!

We let Xander sleep in and veg for the day, ha ha!