Charlotte and Jared

Hello family,
A round of applause please for the cool blog we are all now a part of. Christmas and New Year were a lot of fun. We went up to Portland to hang with Jared's family, and as soon as we hit Salem, there was a foot of snow on the sides of the road, and when we hit Woodburn we were forced to drive in some very icy ruts in the road at snails pace, and when we took our exit we were feeling very grateful for Jareds snow tires because I don't think they plow in Portland. There was so much snow on all of the roads to his parents house. I did not think we were going to make it there, but we miraculously had no issues at all -- that is until we turned into the driveway. Then we were stuck, stuck, stuck. A very convenient place to get stuck, though. We did a bit of sledding on the neighbors very steep back yard. If we could have, we would have stayed out there all day long. I'm pretty sure that was the first time I had ever truly gone sledding (a hosed down driveway in the middle of the winter doesn't really count...) Three of the pictures attached are from that, the one with the dog is from a week earlier when it iced over here and we created a makeshift sled out of a laundry basket. The dog is Casey and Andreas. We were training for the Iditerod.
Christmas morning was fun; I think Joel was more excited than Drew (who woke up at six, and actually fell back to sleep after asking if Santa came...) Joel was determined to head up to see what Santa brought. New Years was very quiet. We were in bed by 11, Jared was asleep by 11:30 and then startled awake at Midnight when all the neighbors set off fireworks -- very funny, because, by the look on his face, you'd think we were under attack. At the moment, I am home as usual, but with two sickly children who both caught the same cold bug floating around, and at 11:30 am they both decided to take naps... So I am enjoying some rare quiet, alone time in the middle of the day, hence the reason I am so long winded while writing this -- there are no children climbing up on my lap repeatedly asking if they can play the computer. Jared is in Bend tonight, and then off to San Diego for three days of training next week.
We miss you all!