Christmas in Washington

Snow!!! tons and tons of snow! there has been a series of storms from Canada and it has snowed over a foot at my house in Monroe. the roads have been terrible because of the lack of preparation Washington has. it doesn't snow that much here and so they aren't prepared for it. i work outside and it has been in the low teens here just before Christmas, it has not pleasant. it was nice having a white Christmas though. on Christmas eve i shaved most of my hair off and it was at its longest i think it had ever been. its kinda cold now... then we went to church and had a nice service. after that we came back and had a ton of appetisers and opened presents. all of the Ottow kids put their names in a hat and draw for a secret Santa so i had presents from her sister in law and i got a hiking book and hand + foot warmers and a sweet pirana shirt. and from Elle's parents i got a fishing Washington book and some hair product :) i picked Lee, one of Elle's older brothers, i got him a sweet doormat, The Soup Bible and a coffee table book. we drank and played charades till the wee hours of the morning. on Christmas day most of us were sleepy and were moving really slow. we had a nice big Christmas dinner with a quite large bone in ham and it was delicious!! after that we watched What About Bob. its the ottows family movie like the mad mad world is ours. if you want to have a sneak peak at what the family i am living with is like just watch that movie. in all it was a fun Christmas. --Nial

It was awesome to have Nial up here for our first Christmas. He is lucky to experience one of the only White Christmas's ever to happen in recent memory! He also got to make his grand Charades debut! We play it every year and The Girl Team tried our hardest to make it especially embarrassing for our newcomer. :)

Christmas Day was pretty relaxed, cooking, movies, etc. Nial and I furiously attempted to finish a puzzle with a lot of grassy/flowery and sky pictures... ergo- we're not quite finished yet. We snapped almost 300 pictures over the two days but my computer is being crazy so hopefully we'll get some good ones up here! My niece Mia and nephew Jackson were adorable as usual, but they are finally at the point where they'll play together by themselves- its quite a milestone! :) They also had a ton of fun walking slowly on the treadmill with Grandpa (my dad) until he wasn't looking and Jackson turned it on all by himself! He bit his tongue and scraped his chin but he was back 10 minutes later trying to walk on it. --Elle