Snow Day

First and probably only snow day of the winter - we barely got any snow.  The kids were disappointed but made the best of it.  Snowball fight:

Lazy snuggling:

Phoebe in the Kitchen

Phoebe's been cooking more and more as she gets older. Some things she can do by herself and other things she needs to do with a parent, but it's pretty great for mom and dad to wake up to things like a coffee cake in the oven. Here she is pounding cutlets for chicken parm.

Her first shepherd's pie! Phoebe is morally opposed to eating lamb, so Dad made her a beef roast the day before to use as the filling. She made the mashed potatoes and put it all together.  Before:

After:

Globetrotters

The kids go Globetrotters tickets for Christmas. They were pretty excited about it.

The Globetrotters were up to their usual shenanigans.

Confetti bucket!

It wasn't the same as seeing them at their peak in the 70's with Geese, Curly, Sweet Lou, and Meadowlark, but it was still pretty great and more or less the same thing.

Getting autographs on their program.

New Year's Day

We kept with the family tradition of a New Year's Day hike. We went to Shelby Forest, but did a trail that we'd never done before. It was pretty as usual and then we came across the abandoned New Deal-era Mississippi River Group Camp at the top of the hill.  We knew it was in the forest, but just thought it was one or two buildings.  There were probably 20some cabins and other buildings in various states disrepair.  The kids of course thought it was the coolest.

Heading up:

Bath house.

Kitchen.

Mess hall.

Infirmary.

Cabin.

Collapsed cabin.

Swimming pool.

Duck.

Heading down.

Christmas Trip Pt. 3

Christmas morning - it was in the 70s. The kids got some boxing gloves.

Eating leather.

At the beginning of the trip, we stopped at a comic shop in Nashville and the kids each bought a stack of raggedy old comics for the ride.  They read them all, passed them back and forth, and laughed like crazy the whole trip.  It was the best couple of bucks a parent could spend.

The highlight of the return trip was our dinner in Oak Ridge, TN, which is just outside of Knoxville, at Big Ed's.  Here are the kids getting some cheese from the pizza makers - seemed like every high school kid in town worked there.

Surprisingly great pie for the middle of East Tennessee and the atmosphere in a Saturday night was amazing.

Big Ed's - since 1961!