Last Days in Ohio

We woke up Wednesday morning to the first snowfall of the year. Ellie was so exicted, she put her coat and boots on over her pajamas and headed out to make snow paths in our back yard.


Moira banged on the back door, begging to join her, but mean old Mommy kept the little girl with the runny nose inside the house.

Later that day, we had some of Ellie's friends over for a make your own pizza party. Here's a shot of them eating pepperoni and making pizzas.

Mostly they ate pepperoni, except for Kassie, who didn't realize that we needed to BAKE the pizzas before she tried the dough. She said "YUM!" so enthusiastically that I hated to wrestle her uncooked pizza away from her and into the oven. But I did, so don't worry.

And here they are making silly faces on the couch all together:

Goofballs. Ellie really will miss these cute kids who she has loved playing with at the Big, Big Treehouse near our house, even though you can only see the treehouse with your imaginary eyes.

Overall, I think the party was a success. They ate a few bites of pizza, and didn't play my cool "draw a snowman with chalk on black paper" game, but they liked Pin The Star On the Christmas Tree, and the Present Unwrapping Race even got E's friend Jacob off the couch. Poor Jacob didn't seem very interested in the pizza, or the party and kept asking for his mom until I remembered he's crazy about trains. We got out the train set and then he didn't want to go home when his mom showed up.

Moira obligingly slept through the entire party. Which just proves that I never let her do anything fun.

Chris also finished his finals on Wednesday. And I went to Children's Literature Bookclub and got to talk about Christmas books like Olive, The Other Reindeer and Wombat Divine. So Wednesday was a good day.

Our ward party was on Friday, and we headed to the church in order to get free Papa John's pizza. The girls made it all the way up to when Santa showed up, but Santa--as well as vacuums, thunderstorms, and Dora City of Lost Toys--is scary. So there are no pictures of our children with Santa. Instead, I captured Moira with her favorite part of church, a metal thing in the floor where her finger fits (does this thing have a real name? does this thing have a purpose other than a receptical for Moira's finger?):

She really does love that metal thing in the floor. Here she is explaining its finer points to a friend:

Just looking at these pictures makes me laugh. Moira Moira.

Saturday morning, Heather took our family picture that we'll send out with Christmas cards later this week. (I know I'm crazy to try to move AND do Christmas cards, but I'm still trying my hardest to pretend we're not really moving. I scheduled the moving van and then spent the rest of the afternoon crying just thinking about leaving all the great friends we have here.) Anyway, the point of the story is that we got our pictures taken at nine AM, and we still looked pretty snazzy at 9:30, so since we were all dressed up, we decided to head over to Walmart and pick up some packing tape. Because we didn't want to waste all that effort, you know.

Today we had dinner with the Columbus Ohio Temple President, who happens to be both Chris's advisor and his former mission president. (But it just sounds cool when I say it that first way, doesn't it?). President and Sister C are so gracious and kind, and have really watched out for us while we've been here. After a great dinner, they let Moira throwthings down their stairs and helped Ellie play with the cat. Moira, being the animal lover that she is, approached the poor animal with both arms flailing and a joyful shout of "Da!" The cat did not like this.