Christmas

We always spend Christmas at our house. Then, after the presents are all opened and we've played for a little bit, we go to Salt Lake and visit family. We did things a little differently this year. On Christmas eve, Roger checked the weather. It looked like there was going to be a pretty bad storm. We figured the roads would be too bad for us to drive to Salt Lake on Christmas. We didn't want to drive in bad weather and we didn't want to miss out on seeing our family on Christmas. So we decided that we would go to Salt Lake that night and spend Christmas Eve with Roger's mom. It was about 4:00 pm when we decided this, so we needed to hurry. We had the kids play in a room upstairs while we loaded all their presents out to the van. None of the presents were wrapped. We threw a big blanket over them. Then we loaded the rest of our stuff. The whole time that we were hurrying to get everything packed and loaded, I just couldn't decide how I felt about this decision we had made. I don't like change. And I have always spent Christmas at my house. I was very unsure about being somewhere else on Christmas Eve. Everything worked out well. We made it to Roger's Mom's house with out any problems. The kids were really excited. We had a lot of fun. My nieces and nephew also stayed over at Roger's mom's house. It was really fun to spend Christmas with them. After we opened our presents in the morning, we packed up our stuff and headed to my sister, Linda's, house to spend some time with my family. It was a really fun day.

On Christmas Eve we opened one present. Brinley was so excited when she opened her gift. She kept saying "Wow!" everytime someone opened a present.Parker and Roger opening a new spiderman toy. Alissa got a camera! She really wanted one.
Time to go to sleep so Santa can come. Roger leaned his head in right as I snapped the picture.

It's Christmas morning!

I didn't get any good pictures of Alissa opening her presents. I'm a little dissappointed about that. I didn't get any of Brinley either.

O.... I almost forgot to tell about our drive home. So the big storm that we were afraid to drive in turned out to be a lot of rain in Salt Lake. We checked the weather before we left to come home. It showed that it was raining in Tremonton, but a storm wasd going to hit soon. We thought we had a few hours before the storm hit. We loaded the car and headed home. On the way, Roger called a friend who was in Tremonton. His friend told him that it was snowing and that it had been snowing all day. After Roger got off the phone with his friend, my mom called and said that the news just said that 800 homes in Tremonton were without power. We were in Layton at this point and it was sprinkling. The weather was not bad at all. But there was a sign saying that the freeway was closed at the idaho border. So we knew that somewhere the storm was going to get bad. We just didn't know where. I called my neighbor and asked if the power was out. It wasn't. Then I asked her about the weather and she said that it hasn't been bad. I asked if it was snowing and she said no. We were confused since Roger's friend had told us that the weather was really bad. So Roger called his brother-in-law, Scott, and asked him where he was and what the weather was like. He was in Brigham City and he said it was only raining. So we're thinking that maybe we won't have to drive in any bad weather. Maybe the storm gets bad after you pass Tremonton. We were very wrong. In Willard the storm got bad. There was no warning. It didn't start raining harder and then turn into snow. It just went from a little rain to a white out. We could hardly see anything. It was very scary. We were going 20 mph for most of the drive home. It was horrible. I was so scared! We managed to make it home. The funny thing was that we made it through some really scary roads (cars were sliding off all around us, but we managed to make it without getting stuck) but when we got home, we got stuck. We couldn't get in the driveway. The snow was really deep and we got stuck on the sidewalk. We carried the kids inside and decided to wait until morning to move the van. While I was carrying in Christmas presents, someone stopped and offered to help. They helped us backout and Roger tried one more time to pull into the driveway. He came really close to taking out the basketball hoop, but he got the car in the driveway. In the morning we dug the van out and moved it all the way into the driveway.