The Final Christmas of 2007

As it is with so many of life’s memorable experiences, there were good things and bad things about Christmas in Iowa with Moonshot’s family this year. On the plus side I’ll stack family togetherness and almost a foot of pristine snow that sparked a child-like twinkle in this gren’s eye. On the down side I’ll mention the countless hours of late night screaming our Little Lutine inflicted upon us. It seems routine has become quite important to the little miss and sleeping in her Pack-N-Play in a strange room was not on her list of acceptable alternatives to her own bed. The only thing that made her stop crying was to pick hr up and let her play. We were, inexplicably, unable to muster much enthusiasm for playtime at 3 in the morning.

But that’s enough about the down side. I’ll distract myself from the horrible memories by mentioning that I got one last present for the season. The bike previously mentioned was a combined gift from Moonshot’s family and had already been received, so Moonshot saved one of her presents for me so I’d have something to rip open in Iowa. A Star Wars Pop-Up book finished off my holiday season just right. It may well be the coolest thing I’ve ever seen. The light sabers actually light up for god’s sake. I would keep singing it’s praises…but the New York Times did it much better than I could.

Norah received (among other things) a dump truck of her very own. And while she would, on occasion, fill the loader with her toys…she would typically just use the dumped loader to form a bucket seat for her oversized self.

It took some convincing to get everyone out in the snow. It seems not everyone shares my love of snowy fun. But, eventually they were convinced. Warm clothing was borrowed from Husker since I had failed to look at the weather before heading north. Had I known there would be so much snow I would have packed all my Colorado snow gear that sits unloved in my basement. Regardless, though…we trekked out to make a snowman.

Sadly, the powdery snow refused to stick. There would be no snowman. We amused ourselves for a little while with snowballs until I was distracted by the huge snow pile created by the plow. It was probably eight feet tall and at least 20 feet wide…a full sized adventure land of frozen joy. For a while it was fun to climb up and slide down or throw myself off the top in a white, powdery explosion. But eventually I found myself raiding Husker’s garage for digging tools. Moonshot and Mouse ignored my engineering efforts and contented themselves by making a miniature snow fried from the compacted snow I was removing from the bottom of the pile. FreddyJ pretty much just stood there and laughed at me in a good-natured way. My goal was to burrow all the way through the pile…but after I realized that Moonshot and FreddyJ had gone inside and that Husker and Mouse were pretty much just waiting around to keep an eye on things in case the snow should collapse on me, I called the job complete after I connected the main entrance to the exit that was originally designed as a cave-in escape tunnel. It was much shorter than I had envisioned…but by god, it was a tunnel.

And I was proud.

(Clicking any picture reveals its true Christmasy goodness)

All Pictures by Husker