Green tomatoes at their finest!

This past weekend the temperatures were below freezing and with almost no snow on the ground and nothing in particular keeping us busy, we did some baking. Or rather, the Studly Hubby did the baking, while Layla and I cheered him on. He made chili (with cornbread), and a special new apple crisp with GREEN TOMATOES. I was a little uncertain when he brought home the recipe (they were giving it away at the co-op with samples of some they had made, and a story about a local farmer whose tomatoes all got picked early because of the frost).

The apple crisp inspired me to post on the J&D Recipe Blog again, after ~8 yrs. It was that good! Although, I didn't post the actual recipe as it's really long and came from a recipe book you can buy for $4 on Amazon.

It's HOLIDAY SEASON...!!

Usually, Christmas totally sneaks up on me. Thanksgiving will come and go and then WHAM! I barely have time to get the tree up before Christmas is here. This year, as soon as Halloween was over, we were totally focused on Christmas. Maybe it's because we have a 4-yr old in the house. Maybe it's because the cold weather hit suddenly this year, or maybe it's just one of those things.

Before we even got to Thanksgiving, I'm finding myself thinking of where we're going to put the tree, what presents to give, what holiday shows and movies we can go to, and what to put in our annual newsletter. Our 4-yr old has been writing and re-writing her Christmas list and has it ready to go. For those of you who are interested, our family's Christmas lists are in the "Christmas" document you can access on the right side of the website.

Between the snow sprinkle yesterday and another one overnight we had enough to go out and play for a bit this morning. In order to gather enough snow to make snowballs (at Layla's request) we had to shovel the ENTIRE driveway. After a good snowball fight and some general running around in the snow, we came in and had some really excellent hot chocolate from our favorite neighborhood chocolate factory in Seattle, Theo Chocolate.

Derek shows Layla how to make a snowball from their little pile of snow gathered from shoveling the entire driveway

My favorite kind of hot chocolate - from Theo Chocolate with cinnamon and cayenne!! So yummy.

SNOOOOOOOWWWW!!! (for 10 minutes)

We all woke up SUPER excited this morning, beyond our usual 'yay, it's Saturday!' excitement - because we were supposed to get our FIRST SNOW OF THE SEASON!!

The headline in the local paper read

"Lawrence braces for snow"

(although if you read the article you would see that we were only expecting 2-4")

The snow was supposed to start at 9 am. We rushed out to the grocery store to stock up, thinking we might be home all weekend. We got home around 9:30 just as the first flakes began to fall. We jumped around excitedly as more flakes fell. We made plans and checked our snow gear and had a snack.

And then the snow turned into sleet, then rain.

And then it stopped.

All we got was a dusting! We were so sad :(

Oh well, we're bound to get some snow sooner or later.

The gazebo in the park in downtown Lawrence on a snow-filled winter day