A Winter Afternoon

~Alyssa

Winter Wonderland...

~Alyssa

Snow Crystals...

~Alyssa

Our Christmas

Christmas Eve we watched It's a Wonderful Life. It was fun to see it again, especially after having gone to the play earlier this month. Mom said that seeing the play helped her to understand the movie better. :)
Christmas day it snowed and snowed!
After lunch we opened gifts....

Mom and Dad had gone to a Love and Respect conference this fall and got these books for us. They had the authors sign them for us too! Aren't they thoughtful parents?!!

Me and one of my gifts from Dad and Mom - an antique Scotti dog card holder! So cute!
(I really like Scotti dogs...) :)


A cute ornament from Dad and Mom.

Later in the day we listed to/watched a sermon n DVD by James MacDonald about living the Christian life. A good way to end the day!

~Alyssa

Merry Christmas!

Long ago, one silent night,
God revealed His glory bright;
His own image came to man
For salvation's matchless plan.

Jesus, Savior, Shepherd, King -
Lord of all to you we bring
Praises, wonder, thanks, and love
For this gift from God above.

~Alyssa

Spring Weather??

We had a blizzard yesterday!...

...and we received about 10 inches of snow.

The branches are all coated. It's very pretty!

It's snowing lightly yet this morning. :)

~Alyssa

The Adventure of Getting to the Wedding...

This afternoon at 2:00 was the wedding of our neighbor's daughter Amanda. The wedding was in a small town south-west of us. We looked up directions on Map It, and it said it would take us two hours to get there. Two hours? Surely not. But we left around noon - thinking we would probably get there WAY too early. Well, little did we know that it would take us nearly two hours to get to the church since we got lost several times along the way! (On the way home it only took one hour since we finally knew our way around.)

Where are we?

On one snowy drifted hilly gravel road we saw this very unusual deer stand. It is made from the front of a truck! By the way, we had to turn around on this road and go back since it ended up turning into too many snow drifts.

An old church...somewhere out there in farm country!

Dad consulting the map. The map did not show the numbers or names of all the roads so it was interesting trying to figure things out!

By this time we had been driving around for an hour at least and our 'lost' situation was getting to be pretty funny!

When driving around in this flat farmland in winter, things start looking the same after a while...

And I started taking pictures of odd things!

But finally we arrived at the little town and the church!! Praise the Lord! We got there in time to get in and sit down. :) If we had NOT allowed two hours for our drive there, we would have been majorly late.


Guest book.

Sweet Mrs. B. :)

Sisters

Amanda and Andrew!

The way home went much faster. :)

Our family at home.
And thus ends the adventure. :)

~Alyssa

Wadena...

Yesterday we went to Wadena to get goat feed.
I took a few pictures along the way. :)

A cute little town hall in the middle of no where!

At the feed mill. :)

We stopped at the shoe store in town to see if they had any tan dress shoes...but they didn't. They did have this interesting shoe history display though.....

...and some cute old signs.

We checked out the thrift store in town and I found this Roy Rogers songbook! (It was $20.00 thought so I decided not to buy it.) One thing that puzzles me exceedingly is the tendency for these kinds of stores to put a price tag sticker right ON the cover of the books and magazines they think are valuable. A sticker ON THE COVER (!!!) which will more than likely, ruin the cover when it is removed....I can't figure out why they do that!

There were a lot of old shops in the town.

It started to snow on the way home.

Our road - almost home!!

~Alyssa

Snow!

The large drift outside the living room window.

Dad blowing snow. He is so good at it!

It was quite a thick drift!
This has been a very snowy, very COLD, winter. One of our older neighbors told us that this is a normal winter for the area. I'm not sure if that's reassuring news or not! I guess we can take some consolation in how tough we northerners are to be able to endure such a winter!! ;) ....Which reminds me of this list we read in a newspaper once (I've edited it a little) :

Top 10 GOOD things about a Midwest winter:

1. There are no mosquitoes.
2. People are so busy worrying about the car starting they don't have time to worry about anything else.
3. If you carelessly leave meat in the car, it will freeze and stay fresh.
4. It's not as bad as a Manitoba winter.
5. There's the thrill of unexpectedly being totally out of control as your car slides down an icy road.
6. Bundled up as they are, children can fall down three flights of stairs and not get hurt.
7. There's ice fishing in a -50 wind chill, knowing that someone, somewhere, is flabbergasted at how hearty we are.
8. There are no ticks.
   
9. Anything is better than a humid Midwest summer.
   
10. Knowing that the rest of the country is looking at us in total amazement, saying: 'Why in the world do they stay there?'
    

Hmmm....can you think of any others? :)
~Alyssa