Thanksgiving Break

In an effort to cut costs, the school district increased the kids' Thanksgiving Break from 2 1/2 days to 5 days this year. That meant we had a full week and two weekends to hang out, so we hit the road and drove to Pocatello, ID, to visit my in-laws. Oh yes. We know how to live it up! We left on Friday before Thanksgiving when the kids got out of school. We had nice dry roads on the way down, but the next day we woke up to this:

It was a winter wonderland and it snowed all day on Saturday. The kids spent a little time playing in it, but we weren't really prepared for so much snow and I didn't think to bring their snow pants, so they got really wet. And cold. Thankfully we did have gloves and hats.

As you can see, I was unwilling to leave the comfort of the house to get any real pictures of them in the snow. I'm not crazy after all. :O) 

There's only so much entertainment to be gleaned from a snowstorm when you have no snow pants, so we loaded everyone up and hit the local kid-haunt. I can't remember the name of the place, but it was similar to Wahooz in Boise. The kids played arcade games and miniature golf and then cashed in their tickets for a pile of junk that we got to haul home. Fun times. 

They did have fun though and it did get them and us out of the house for a few hours. All in all, I count it as a successful day. The next day was Sunday and the forecast was for more snow, but we had to get home so Mike could be to work on Monday. Here's how things looked on the way home.

Not great.  We white knuckled it home and arrived safely, but it took a little longer than normal. As I'm sure you can imagine.

We've had such a strange Fall this year. The weather got so cold so fast that the trees didn't drop their leaves. So the next day this is what our yard looked like. We still had a LOT of leaves to rake, IF they'd ever drop off the trees!!

I absolutely love this tree and the color it provides in the Fall. I was afraid some of the branches would break off from the weight of the snow and the leaves. I'm somewhat happy to report that at press time all of the leaves are finally off the tree and the city was nice enough to pick them up with the Christmas trees this year (since we completely missed the curbside leaf pick up this year). We weren't the only ones with New Year's leaf bags. We had 3 or 4 bags of leaves to put out this week but I think our neighbors had 8 or 10!  This wasn't the only excitement in the Slaughter House over Thanksgiving Break. I'll be back with more of the breath-taking play by play soon. Promise.