TEAM USA ROCKS!

If you missed last night's Olympic coverage you missed a whole lot. It was totally awesome! We won 6 medals: 3 gold, 1 silver, and 2 bronze.

Shaun White owns the sport of snowboarding. He was in first place going into the second run and he won without his second run. However, he decided to do the run anyway and just have fun. He had perfected a totally new trick and it nailed it last night. His teammate won bronze.

Lindsey Vonn is one of those feel-good, redemption stories. Last winter Olympics, she was the heavy favorite and had a slip up and finished with the silver. This time going into the games, she suffered a shin injury and was unsure about how she would compete. Her teammate Julia Mancuso was holding the lead going into the final skiiers. Several women had violent crashes going down this hill and Lindsey had to ski it with an injury. She rocked the hill and won the gold. She was so emotional and humbled by the win. Shani Davis won the gold in speed skating and his teammate won the bronze. These are some fast skaters. These athletes and more are totally inspiring. One of the cross country female skiiers from another country fell off the course yesterday into a ravine, landed on a rock on her back, went for x-rays, and managed to compete in the final. Unfortunately she did not win the gold, but she competed through the pain.

What Can Be Better Than Snow Cream?

Yesterday morning, we woke up to a beautiful surprise -- soft, fluffy SNOW! When we went to bed, the weather forecast was just rain. The winter storm watch had been cancelled. I guess God had plans for snow that He did not share with the weatherman. Before I left for work, the kids ran outside and gathered up two huge bowls of snow so that they could make snow cream.

Kirsten enjoys a big bowl of vanilla snow cream.

Alec chose to eat chocolate ice cream. This is a true treat that we do not get to partake of very often. In other news, I learned something new about the printer at work. This printer is prone to paper jams. I am used to being able to un-jam said printer. However, yesterday, the paper jam was in a very unreachable location. I pulled and prodded and pushed and tugged and thought that I had removed all of the paper. The printer had other ideas and it was still beeping that there was a paper jam. I reached in the printer from another location and discovered that the drum inside was super HOT! (Did you know that there are thermal printers and that they reach 500 degrees?) I had no idea that this printer held that kind of temperature. The tips of two of my fingers are burned pretty deep and I was an unhappy camper for a few hours. I did treat them with some burn cream immediately and they are feeling much better. I have very little feeling in the tips of these two fingers and I am trying to be careful to not knock off the blisters on the tips. They blistered up almost immediately and I thought that they were burned worse than they are, so I am grateful that they are better.

TEAM USA

At our house, we love to watch the Olympic games and shout USA! USA! USA!

It doesn't matter the sport or matter if it is summer or winter games we watch as much of the competition as we can. For the winter Olympics, we especially enjoy the skiing and the ski jumping, the short track and regular speed skating, and the figure skating. The children even enjoy the curling events. We, however, do not enjoy the competitons that are judged by partial judges. Even tonight, two teams who had falls during their event scored higher than the American team who did not fall. That is hard to explain to your children when you do not understand it yourself. This does not hamper our viewing of the games. For the next two weeks we will be in front of the TV watching the games. It brings out the best in us and our patriotism as well. I just do not understand the people who do not watch the games at all.

A Surprise Snow!!!!!!!!!!!!!

We woke up this morning to see some falling white stuff. The weather man did not predict this storm at all and it was a total surprise to see the snow falling. At first is was falling just a little, then it fell so hard that things in the distance were not visible at all. Unfortunately, we did not receive as much as some did to the north of us. We only got 1/2 - 3/4 of an inch. My sister in Falkner (10 miles away) got almost 5 inches and they made a snowman taller than a man.

These horses were not enjoying the snow at all.

This picture shows how hard the snow was falling in Ripley.

Sledding down the hill -- we just had to be creative with what we have.

We collected 9 other children while we were walking through town in the snow. My niece and most of my nephews as well as some friends walked home with us to play.

The kids used big trash bags to sled on. It worked fairly well, but I was wishing for more snow.

Most of the snow has disappeared by this point.