Winter Party

**Warning: This blog might be a long one, as I wanted to keep my Grandma and Grandpa up to speed on what happened at the cabin this year!

We just got back from the annual family “Winter Party” at my Grandpa’s cabin in Bear Lake. Each Presidents Days we travel to the cabin and spend the weekend with my family. This year the change is altitude caused my feet, hands and face to swell up a little and Robbie’s allergies acted up making his eyes itch like crazy! But we all still had a great time as usual!

Uncle Bart’s family was the first to arrive (about 1:00 am Thursday) and had to use a sled system to get their kids and luggage up over a huge mound of snow and forge a new path to get into the cabin! Most of the rest of us started showing up on Friday night and the snow was so deep and parts of the road were pretty icy, so a few of my relatives’ cars couldn’t make it up the hill! Luckily, when Robbie and I showed up Friday we didn’t have a problem, I love the Subaru more every time winter comes! It was fun when people who were parked at the bottom of the hill had to go somewhere, because we employed a “shuttle service” to get people up and down the hill to their cars!

Saturday a big group of people went skiing/snowboarding at Beaver Mountain. I couldn’t go this year, because the doctor said no skiing while I’m pregnant. Robbie went and said everyone had a great time. A few of the kids took some lessons, including my brothers Jon (12) and Tyler (9). Ty was a little disappointed this year because his ski instructor was a guy and not “a Hot Chick”.

Robbie, Matt and Leslie packing their lunches for skiing!

Another group of people went to Montpelier to tube and Mom and I spent the day shopping for groceries, relaxing and watching Sense and Sensibility…what a great show! When eveyone got back we had popcorn and played games. There was a contest for the popcorn and I believe it was the Chocolate Marshmallow popcorn that won, although there were a lot of good and original flavors. The most original was probably Uncle Brad’s…he made a carmel popcorn with cayenne pepper or something; first you got the carmel flavor and then the heat came, it was unlike any popcorn I’ve ever had before!

Sunday we drove in to Paris for church. We all decided that it must be Grandma and Grandpa that usually make us late, because we were actually all on time this year! My family had Sunday dinner, so we decided to make a “Taco Bar”. We spent the early afternoon cooking.

Me dicing up the tomatoes, right before I cut my finger.

Aunt Cheryl planned a great family home evening where we all learned cool facts about President Thomas S. Monson. After the trivia game, we played a wild game of “Fruit Salad”, which is kind of like musical chairs minus the music and organized walking in a line and adding in that not everyone moves at once and there is a lot of diving for spots to stay in the game! It was a lot of fun and there weren’t too many injuries. After the game my Mom got out a piñata. Robbie was holding this piñata and frequently he would move it so it would attack the person swinging. This was the toughest piñata I have ever seen. Everyone who got a chance to hit got three hits (hits not swings) before they had to pass the beater stick to another person. Here is a list of all of the people it got through before the piñata broke open: Calista, Monique, Eli, Dacee, Adrien, Gavin, Tyler , Peyton, Jon, Tori, CJ, Audri, Leslie, Jenni, Andy, Natalie and Alicia. I couldn’t believe it took so long to break!

Monday found us all packing up and getting ready to leave, but not before we got some serious sledding in down the hill in the back yard.

Building the course, CJ getting some air, I gave it a try too