our january

Has been a busy one. You can expect a long, random post every now and then from me, there just is not enough time to do small frequent ones at the moment.

This is an old pic, but Julian is crawling. He is all over the place doing an army crawl. I was making dinner in the kitchen last night and here he comes crawling down the long hallway to join me. Cute little bugger. He will be 9 months old tomorrow which I can not believe.

I have been studying and studying and studying. Gabrielle has had more free time and less supervision as you can see. I am attempting to finish an intense 3 month class in less then 2, and I am getting close, I think I might be done in another 2 weeks. My reason for working my butt off is that then I can hit the books for my IBCLC exam. I am hoping to take it this year but may postpone it a year if I am not able to get enough study time in the next few months. I only have one chance a year, it is always only offered in July. My other reason for working so hard is that my grant for my new job has been sent in as of last week, I hope never to work on another grant ever again by the way! The money is expected to roll in March 1st and then I have to hit the ground running.

It has been snowing as you can see. We have officially run out of places to stash the white stuff.

The good news is that the snow mounds are so high that every one makes a great sledding hill! I caught Madeline and a friend on the roof of the house yesterday trying to sled down. The snow hill was up to the roof so I guess I don't blame them for thinking it would be fun.

Once we dug out the hot tub, we discovered that the last storm dropped so much snow at once, 40 inches, that the cover broke in half. We had to quickly drain it and cover it for the winter.

For the first time we hired a crew to come out and shovel the roof, we had 5 feet of snow on the roof and it had to come off. It would of taken Ryan the entire weekend and he refuses to climb up there after falling off last year!

My backyard. My living room is raised from the backyard, you have to go down an entire flight of stairs to get to the yard, and the snow is up to the window in the living room.

Madeline has been snowboarding and snowboarding and snowboarding. She went 4 times this week, not bad for a 7 year old whose dad works 60 hour weeks and two younger siblings. She is quite good. This hill is less then 10 minutes from our house, offers challenging runs and night skiing. Ryan took up her to Purg the other day, which is the big ski resort 40 minutes away. She spent the entire day doing all the black runs, which is what she does at Hesperus as well. She quickly learned how to board in all this recent powder but does have a problem once in a while like the other night where she sunk up to her chest in the fresh snow. She is going up again today, snowboarding is all she thinks and talks about, I didn't expect to have this problem with a child when she was 7 years old!

The pic didn't show it but her face is actually wind burned from all the time spent flying down the slopes.