Santa & Claire's Sledding Highlights

Christmas Eve morning my entire family was together at last! First on our agenda was Santa pictures at Fashion Place Mall. I already blogged about Claire's picture: you can view that post here. I was actually really happy that she was crying so hard. It definitely made for a good photo. The group photo (Claire and all of her cousins), on the other hand, turned out to be not so good. The people couldn't even hold the camera straight. Annoying!

After Santa, naps, and lunch, we headed up to The Spruces for sledding. We were hoping to go to Mt. Dell Golf Course because we've heard the sledding is awesome, but they didn't have any snow. The snow where we were was very icy and hard, but at least they had snow. This marked Claire's first time in her new snow suit and being thrust down a giant hill. But first things first....family pictures to document the event. (I've learned that it is best to do "portraits" first so that they are out of the way, I am usually freshly made up, and heaven forbid we actually forget to take them.) :)

 

Moments later, Claire was having the time of her life. Sometimes she was full of smiles, others a little surprised, and a couple of times she was outright scared. To our amazement, she never cried from going down the slide. Yay for Claire!

The photo below is my favorite one of the afternoon. Her facial expression is hilarious! The funniest thing about it is that she wasn't even going down the hill. Erik was pulling her across the snow and she started to fall backwards in the sled. I guess it was quite scary.

We spent a couple of hours going down the icy hill and had tons of fun. My oldest nieces were enjoying every minute of it and my nephew, a total adrenaline junky, couldn't have fit in any more rides down the hill if he tried. Even when I was sure he got hurt, he got up with a smile on his face and went at it again. I hope Claire grows up to have that much audacity.

Doing activities like this is usually quite an ordeal, but in the end, I am always glad we make the effort to do them. Dressing in tons of layers, packing all of Claire's stuff, driving to our destination, and putting myself on 'photo duty' so we have great pictures to document the day, is never the most pleasant thing in the world. However, doing a fun activity with my family and having the memories and photo evidence to prove it makes it all worthwhile.