"Thank You, "Santa"! " and "lights out.."

In his letter to Santa before Christmas, David requested an ice rink in our basement. We tried to break the news to him that Santa most likely couldn't do that because you can't put ice rinks in basements. He understood, so then he requested an ice rink for our backyard from Santa...even showing me a picture from a magazine of a backyard ice rink! I told him that we live in Maryland, and Santa wouldn't be able to make an ice rink in our back yard because it doesn't get cold enough...Last week, he came home from school and headed outside with his ice skates, yelling, "Thank you santa, Thank you Santa!!!" ...our yard was an ice rink! They skated all over the front yard and then decided to go to a flatter area. Here is a video of the kids skating on the flat top...Melissa is wearing her ice skates from santa for the first time.

On friday night we had our first "power outage" preparedness night. We decided to see how ready we are for a power outage. We picked the coldest time of the year to do this to see how well we could stay warm. We also have a well, so in addition to losing power, we lose water. We planned this night with the kids, but we didn't tell them what time the electricity would be cut. They were somewhat excited and all ran to do their individual jobs when we did cut it. The plan: to have everyone sleep in the great room near the fireplace, cook with our camping gear with food from food storage (in the garage of course), use the generator for the fridge, some heat, some light and maybe the TV for movies...We couldn't get the generator working, so we had no heat, very little light and definately no movies...We had the fire, but it couldn't heat the whole room...the kids were near it, so we kept it going all night...

we learned a lot from our experiment...we need to get the generator working, we need to get long burning logs for the fire place and we need to get a pump for our water storage containers...other than that, I think we are well prepared!

Melissa on her cot near the fireplace...

Dale chillin' out on our fancy air mattress!