Winter Magic at Buckeye Lake

On Sunday, we got to spend the afternoon outside celebrating my niece's 6th birthday at Buckeye Lake. Usually we enjoy swimming and going on boat rides when we are at Buckeye Lake but winter time fun can be quite different! The Lake was (mostly) frozen except where it wasn't. Yeh, I can't explain all of it either except to say that I was really only nervous once- when one of the four wheelers appeared to be sinking into the mushy part of the ice and my brother had to lasso it and pull it to a stronger part of the ice. Anyhoo, not to worry grandparents, we were very safe!!

**** To see the whole album of pictures, even the stinky ones I didn't delete, go to the end of this post******

We arrived at the party with about 30 of my brother and sister-in-laws friends and everyone brought a little something to do-there were four wheelers racing around the ice (and some of them were towing sleds full of kiddos), a couple ice boats, ice skates and there was one snow mobile but I'm not really sure if they were with us or not. The kids were outside about 2 1/2 hours and Muffin and Doodle never complained once. It was about 20 degrees though and that was a heat wave compared to the -14 degrees it hit on Thursday or Friday.

Annabelle is my brother Frank's oldest daughter and she is so much fun to be around. She is happy doing just about anything as long as she has company. Here she is in all her glory celebrating her 6th birthday with Doritos and loving every minute!!I only realized as I typed this that Doodle took off her mittens to drink her hot chocolate and eat her Doritos. That didn't last long though because anything exposed quickly became painful.

Doodle was very excited to try skating for the first time with skates that I used as a child. Muffin had to use my skates (size 10 thank you very much) because we couldn't find hers (that's what happens when ice skates become a summer time toy-you can't find them in the winter) and she actually did pretty well too. Here she is just helping Doodle:
Mator spent a very small amount of time out in the cold. She hung out a lot in our van watching Nemo. She's like her mommy, she doesn't like to be uncomfortable for long. Here she is admiring her snowy mittens:
Here she is riding the four wheeler with Andy. I liked this shot because she is actually smiling (not grimacing as the weather might suggest).
Here is Doodle digging in the bank of the lake. The kids had a ball digging around and Muffin even unearthed an entire seagull carcas. Yeh!
Here is Annabelle's little sister, Wilson. She is 3 1/2 and cute as a button. She didn't last too long either though and went back to her cozy house with her Mimi.
I think that this is Andrea's brother Tyler with his son (I think Mitch because Scott was on Erin's lap) pulling another boy on the tube. This was the best shot I got to show how that worked:
What an awesome time followed by wonderful food and fun times at Annabelle's house that evening. Yes, I was very careful on the ice with my healing knee which incidentally, is healing great! Thank you Lord!