Snow Season

I've been appreciating this star right outside our living room window.  We can see it from our couch.

It has once again been snowing most of the day with a couple inches piled up.  The temperatures lately have been hovering around 0 degrees or as Eric likes to say, there has been no temperature in Saskatoon for the past weeks.  We heard the snow plow budget for this year has already been used up, as there usually isn't this much snow before Christmas.

Beautiful hoar frost (per Eric's knowledge of frost identification) for the first Sunday of Advent.  The service was full of music, the choir sang Breath of Heaven, and Annabel jumped and flailed her arms and legs to the band the entire service!  She was so exhausted afterwards, she took her first ever 2 hour daytime nap! (but, now it is past 11:30 pm and she has yet to go to bed.  She's not crying, but nothing seems to be working tonight.) 

Knowing that few people will see our decorations and the fact that we won't be here for Christmas made it a bit hard to find ambition to put up Christmas decorations, but I put them up and felt better afterwards.  I just love sitting in the evening with Christmas lights in the house....I'll have to make hot chocolate some night to enjoy the scene even more.  We have one main living area with our living room and kitchen all in one, so all of our decorations are in the same space.  I had a bunch out, but felt it was a bit of red and green overload, so I put some away.  One day we'll able to put up a full size tree and get all of our ornaments out of the box.

The mall was offering a chance to see Santa where we could take our own photos.  I thought it was a good option because we weren't sure how Annabel would react.  She hasn't been afraid of strangers (or "making strange" as they say here), but we just didn't know about a man in red with a big white beard.  But, the line was so long we had to skip out.  I imagine we will get another chance since Santa doesn't have as far to travel from the North Pole.  He could probably manage to make a couple stops before Christmas Eve.
 
We have been Skyping quite a bit lately and Annabel is just starting to react to the screen by smiling and seems to be recognizing some voices and faces. 

It's helpful to have a sister who is an infant teacher so she can give me cute craft ideas.  Eric really enjoyed this Thanksgiving birthday gift from Annabel:

There is a neat one for Christmas using the baby's fingerprints as Christmas light bulbs and Chelsea said she wants to do a penguin one with Annabel when we are home for Christmas.  Fun stuff.