More Christmas at Bowstring pix

We managed to get everyone to sit still (sort of) for a family photograph!
Sarah with her cousins, Ella (almost 3) and Madeline (almost 6).
Grandma Gordon arranged for all of us to go on a horse-drawn sleigh ride through the forest last Thursday. We had fun singing songs and playing in the hay. Here's Noah and Lucas with one of the horses.

Aaron and Ellaina on the sleigh ride. Awww!
Today, Grandpa Gordon and Uncle Aaron drilled a few holes in the ice (which was almost a foot thick) so the kids could try their hand at ice fishing for the first time. Here's Lucas giving it try. Madeline caught a small perch!

Christmas at Bowstring

We've all been having a great time at Bowstring Lake for the Christmas holidays. Today everyone (except Erin and Sarah) went sledding at the big hill near Mosomo Point. It was the first time sledding for Madeline and Ella, and they loved it!
The sledding hill was pretty big, so Ella made her sled runs starting about halfway down. She's so silly!
Madeline and Caleb "doubled" on one sled several times. They got a little banged up, but that's all part of sledding!

Hockey's a breeze!

Noah was getting ready for his hockey game this evening, and I got to wondering how Sarah would look wearing his breezers. Well, here she is! She's had a lot of gas lately, so she gave new meaning to the word "breezers."

Beautiful weather!

Rich did more geocaching with Caleb on Dec. 13 ... it was 42 degrees, and still no snow! Noah and Lucas chose to stay home on this excursion, so we drove a few miles over to Maple Grove and found three "treasure" caches in Elm Creek Park Preserve, which has 15 miles of trails. We heard owls on the walk back to the van, and Erin had sloppy joes ready for us!

A fuzzy attempt at art ... the park horizon at dusk.

Caleb the geocacher

Caleb and I spent four hours today doing some geocaching. Put simply, this is a hobby done by people who own a GPS (Global Positioning System) receiver and have access to www.geocaching.com. You visit the website, get the coordinates of a "cache" near you, and then use your GPS receiver to go on a "treasure hunt" and visit sites where other people have hidden caches. Inside, they put trinkets for kids to trade and a logbook for the adults to sign, showing they were there. Here, Caleb is holding a "travel bug," which started three years ago in Madison, Wis., and has been moved from cache to cache, including as far away as Hawaii, Alaska and Texas. We're going to drop it off in a cache in Alexandria in a couple of weeks!

Squirrel-head

Sometimes Lucas wakes up and runs around in the morning with bed-head. Erin tells him, "Lucas, it looks like a squirrel fell asleep in your hair last night!"