Winter Review of Mostly Doodle

Here are those famous Glitter Angels that made our cheerleading season so much fun! And a special mom (Kathy) and special niece (Justine) that helped so much!
And here's the reason I became a cheerleading coach....Here is my Doodle, perfectly perky and cheery before a game....
And this is my wonderful niece who was such an awesome helper-Justine!

Now that the snow is melted, I feel like I can begin to appreciate its beauty again. I am pretty sure that we had snow (a LOT of it) on the ground for every day of February. Now for Vanessa, my friend that lives practically in the arctic circle, that may not be a big deal. But around here, if we do get a big snow, it is usually gone in a week. I will say, we made the most of this snow! Across the street from our house is my dad's pond. We make this our four season resort. The dam of the pond is a nice little sledding hill and also a fun place to build snowmen.

Here's Justine, Doodle and Muffin with our house in the background. Don't be too confused. The lens can fool you. Our house is a good 400 yards away with a road dividing the property.

My brother got his snowmobiles running too. Here's Andy scaring the life out of Doodle... no wait, she loved it. It was me that was scared. Especially when I hear things like this...
Muffin-"Daddy let me drive the snowmobile and my bottom came OFF the seat when we drove over the driveway."
Doodle-"Daddy only fell off once when it tipped over but I fell off a bunch of times!"
And, to continue the Doodle theme of this post, here she is the night of her school program about dinosaurs. This is her best friend, Faith...
And here she is performing in the program. So stinking cute! And did I mention she had one of the hardest speaking parts? She had words like "evolutionists" and "fossils" and a lot of others that are hard to say in a microphone by yourself. But, after taking a few seconds to adjust the mike, taking a few more to swallow hard, she did an awesome job!

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!