Christmas

This Christmas stuff is pretty magical. We were flying out at 7am Christmas morning, so a few weeks before Christmas, Bodie talked to the big guy in the red suit at the mall. He asked Santa if he could "swing by a day early when you are delivering gifts to the kids in China," and wa-la, our Christmas came early! Impressive Santa, really impressive.

When we ran out to the front room, we noticed some arrows pointing to the downstairs. I'm pretty new to this stuff, so I looked to my big brother for guidance when my parents asked us what we thought they were for. "Oh, those arrows are just to show us where more balloons are; I can see some balloons at the bottom of the stairs." Sure, balloon arrows I thought, that makes sense. Good point Bodie. So we stayed on the main floor and began opening gifts, then played, then opened another gift, then had breakfast - all the while walking over those "balloon pointing arrows."

I dropped a ball down the stairs and went to retrieve it. As I did, Bodie shouted, "Wait, I can see a toy down there," and raced down in front of me. He found a three-level car garage that Santa had left - it was awesome. So we began to play with the garage. My parents stood on the other side of the room asking, "Who is that for?" We ignored them and kept playing so they asked again. After about five minutes, we both finally looked up and saw a big card that said, "For Gates." Bodie was crushed; I was psyched.
Then he yelled with a smile, "But Santa wouldn't bring just one gift!" and he finally noticed this...it was about five feet from us - we never even looked up. My parents thought it was hilarious. Santa is a bit crazy because he gave my brother a seven foot race track. Clearly he didn't see the size of our house.
Christmas morning we hopped on a plane and headed to Utah for two weeks of fun. Luckily Bodie prayed for snow and boy did his prayer work. They had the biggest snowfall so far this year, starting on Christmas day! We spent Christmas day at my Uncle Rick and Aunt Margo's house. A Lybbert family tradition is to have wacky things on your plate at Christmas breakfast - this year it was bad teeth. I felt oddly comfortable with this group of crazies, but chose to pass on inserting the false teeth for the photo. (may I suggest you click on this photo to enlarge it, I guarantee laughs, especially if you do a close up on my dad and grandma!)
We filled the trip with sledding, skiing, ice skating, friends, and family - does it get any better than that? No skiing for me this year; so I did a lot of socializing in the lodge. We spent a few days out at Last Chance where we usually water ski in the summer. This visit we got to ice skate on the frozen lake and it looks like Bodie has finally mastered the sport!

Two other highlights were movie nights and dinner with the StJeor's and dinner with the Cook/McQueen family (they got a new brother!)

 

Lucky us to have such awesome cousins, friends, and family.