Christmas Photos

These are some of the photos I took on Christmas morning. Several of the photos are blurry. I just bought a new, more complicated, camera and have not figured everything out yet. Mainly that I have to open the flash up for it to work. I'll get it right eventually.

Christmas

Hope everyone had a great Christmas. We had a great one here in CO. The kids got more gifts than they needed of course, but we had a lot of fun playing with their new toys. I spent half Christmas Eve night and part of Christmas day assembling games. Of course our new puppy, Bow, has made Christmas even more eventful.

We drove to KS last friday and picked him up Saturday morning. The drive out was awful in 40 mph cross winds and snow. I was beginning to believe the storm was a hint to turn around and forget about a dog, but we made it there and back safely. We had stopped there on our way back to Colorado from our Thanksgiving visit and told the kids I knew the people and wanted to visit. The kids had played with the 7 males from the litter of 11 puppies. They thought my "friends" just happend to have a litter of puppies.

When we pulled into their drive Isaac remembered it was the house with the puppies and they were all hoping the puppies were still there to play with. Olivia said, "I bet the two with the blue and green colars are already gone." They had no clue the green colar was to mark our puppy. We went in the house and our puppy was inside waiting for us. We let the kids play with him for 10 or 15 minutes before Heather asked them if they wanted to take him home. It took us almost as long to convince them that he was our puppy and was going home with us and that he was ours when they played with him the first time. From there all the way back to Colorado was a never ending argument over who got to sit in front of the kennel that Bow was riding in.

So far he has been a good puppy. I've been using the kennel to house train him and I think he is going to catch on pretty quick. I've been reading several books on trainging pointing labs, by the way he is a pointing lab, and have started the early stages of retrieving. He loves to chase after the bumper and bring it back, but only give him a little and then put it away while he is still exited about it. We'll see how it goes, but I think the only thing that will hold him back will be my patience for training.

I have several Christmas photos of the kids to post, but haven't downloaded them to the computer yet. I'll get them up in the next couple days.

Happy New Year!

Dec. 8 and 9 th

We skied on Saturday at Ski Cooper. Ski Cooper is a much smaller area than the resort we skied last year, Beaver Creek, but it is plenty big for us and there are no crowds. It was snowing pretty hard while we were there but we still made several runs. Isaac and Olivia picked up where they left off last year, but Boyd needs a couple more times out to get back up to speed. He tired out pretty quick. Heather had a couple falls that I missed while keeping track of the kids, but I could tell she planted her head into the snow by the amount of snow wedged between her goggles and helmet. Last weekend we had around 15" of snow and from the 6th to the 9th we had from 12 to 18 additional inches of snow.

On Sunday afternoon we cut our own live Christmas Tree. Permits can be purchased from the National Forest Service for $10. The trees they allow you to cut are scarcely better than a "Charlie Brown Tree", but Heather and the kids enjoyed it. I kept waiting for a light to shine down on the perfect tree like it did for Clark W. Grizwald in Christmas Vacation, but I never saw anything more than snow. The tree was probably around 12' tall prior to me trimming the bottom off. Boyd was the only one who would help decorate it once we got it trimmed and stood up in the basement (our artificial one is in the window upstairs). Heather, Isaac and Olivia set around and watched. I guess the fun was gone once it was home.