The past few days

Taylor and I are trying to get the kids to learn how to give gifts and this year is our first year really trying it out. Taylor had a wonderful idea of immortalizing our hands using plaster. It is a gift for me, from my three men. Jeriah and I held hands while keeping them dunked in setting gel. He did really good actually. He only cried and fought to get his hand out a couple of times. Our hands turned out wonderful. They are on the left side of the picture. Taylor and Lukas did it next. It's really hard to keep a one year old's hand still, so Lukas kept wiggling around and kind of made a mush out of the gel. But I think their hands are beautiful and the imperfections of Lukas' hand helps to remind me that he is my baby, small, innocent, and loves to explore. If it was perfect, it would somehow be not as special to me.

Also, I was blessed to finally get my road bike! I can't tell you how excited I am to have this bike. I haven't taken it for a spin yet, since there's about 2 feet of snow on the ground, but I go look at it, play around with it, dream of where I'm going to ride, etc. I can't wait. I've signed up to be on a relay team for a triathlon in Canby, OR in May, and I'm going to sign up for a sprint ride here in town this summer. I can't tell you exactly what it is that draws me so to cycling, but I love it. Maybe it's the speed, the wind in my hair, the ability to get out in nature and be in total control over where and how far away from home I go, the goals I can set for myself and then accomplish... yeah, that doesn't really describe it. I never would have thought that I'd be into cycling. I mean, it's just a bike, right? We all learn to ride when we are kids. What's the big deal? Maybe to me it's kind of like why people are driven to climb mountains.

Speaking of snow... we have lots of it. Maybe it's just normal life here for Idaho people, but to me, I've never seen this much snow unless it was a blizzard that closed everything down for a week. We have about two feet now. I looked at our forcast and we are going to get at least one more foot by the end of the week. It snowed for the past two days straight and finally the sun came out today. Yesterday I went outside and shoveled our driveway and sidewalk at about 11am. I then cleaned off our car, the white one (oh, can't really tell which can you? the white one is the closest one.), and went to run errands (you can see how much snow landed on our car since then). By 5pm or so there was another 6 inches and if we wanted to take the car anywhere we would have had to shovel again. Taylor shoveled today, and we will have to shovel again, and again, and again... I think shoveling is going to be just a fact of life. It's so cold here that the snow doesn't melt. Every time it snows, it just adds to what is already there. These pictures don't really show you how much is there, but it'll give you a good idea.