Winter's Arrival

The first full day of my mom's visit here happened too also be the first day of Winter. Mom always said most times she would visit, there would be snow - even in the normally mild North Carolina Winters. Well, the chances for snow were greatly increased when she hopped on a plane (in December) and headed here (to Colorado) less than a week before Christmas. Tonight with snow expected to start anytime, we took our usual "snow poll". (by the way, we did get about an inch of the frozen stuff a couple days ago, too)

For some reason, The Girl started referring to Mr. LH and I as "Ma and Pa" this week...I think maybe as a result of Little House on the Prairie overload. Funny enough, as soon as the guesses were all in, the snow started falling...around 6pm. by 10am the next day, we had 8 inches on the driveway. 10 1/4 inches in the grass (yowza!).

No matter...Mr. LH shoveled (and thank goodness he was home to do that),

and I started baking cookies with The Girl.

We started on the Gingerbread Men (and ladies).

Then we moved on to the peanut butter blossoms...

the Oatmeal Raisin (not really a Christmas-y cookie, but I had dough to use up) and more butter cookies.

And finally the buckeyes..."Santa's" request.

The "Pickles" spent some time outside getting sufficiently chilled.

Once our dinner of piping hot chicken stew and homemade crusty bread was finished, I set up the table for the "Pickles" to decorate the gingerbread cookies.

The Boys "one eyed alien" cookie

Even Mr. LH joined in with a gingerbread "State of Colorado" cookie (like the "snow capped Rocky Mountains"?).

They sure came up with quite an assortment of cookies!

In case you're wondering, that makes just over 34 inches of snow so far this season (since October).