December 2022, Part 1

Whew, the first half of December was a doozy! We had about 4 feet of snow over a two week period, and the city simply couldn't keep up with those large accumulations back to back to back. The girls had six snow days over the course of that two week period {and lots of fun holiday school events cancelled}, and Derek had a couple days off, too! {He even had a day where he had to get towed out of his parking lot at the hospital!} All USPS mail and Amazon packages were at a complete stand-still for about ten days {on top of already incredibly slow shipping speeds to Alaska, which is less than ideal to say the least at Christmastime}. Apparently snowfalls of this magnitude and frequency aren't the norm here. August was our first month in Alaska, and it was the third rainiest month on record for Anchorage. And now we've gotten to experience the snowiest December ever on record for Anchorage...we'll be very happy to not see any more "records" for a while!

Once again, these pictures unfortunately uploaded in reverse order, so we are working our way backward from December 15th to the 1st...here we go!

{making molasses crinkle cookies!}

The next series of pictures was taken out of sheer awe at how massive the snowbanks were between the houses down our street. 

Derek shoveled a path from our driveway to our backyard where the kids sled. Well, apparently moose don't like to walk in the deep snow either because we are regularly finding their tracks in our path.

{Shelby's winter orchestra concert}

{the girls checked out a hairstyle book from the library & Shelby did a fishtail braid on Hadley}

Derek bought an upholstery cleaner to clean our couch cushions to elongate its life a bit. The kids enjoyed the process quite a bit!

We missed the annual MM gingerbread decorating event this year, but the base bowling alley hosted a little gingerbread party. It wasn't anything special, but we still had fun.

On one of our first snow days, a fun Christmas package arrived from my friend Nicole that included kinetic sand. The kids sat like this playing with their sand while I read to them for a little over an hour. It was pure snow day magic! Such a sweet way to spend a cold, snowy morning.

Derek's mom always does a fun Christmas craft with the grandkids each year. It actually started out with Lucas, Maleah, Derek, and me doing the activities, and has since been passed down to the next generation. BooBoo mailed the craft to us this year, and the kids had fun creating their Christmas houses on a snow day.

{continuing our Advent traditions in Alaska}

Brady and I attneded a homeschool clay class at the Arts & Crafts Center one morning on base and then went out to lunch with Derek and to Crumbl afterward.

As I am typing this post, our temperatures have been in the mid to upper twenties today, which seems almost warm compared to the weather we experienced earlier this month. The lowest temperature I saw on my dashboard was -18 degrees driving to pick the girls up from school one afternoon. We even experienced our first "ground blizzard." It seemed like the temperatures were either below or hovering around zero for so long. It's certainly a whole new world here for us. I think the hardest adjustment for me personally has been the lack of sunlight. We of course knew the days would be shorter here in the winter (at this point in the year, the sun isn't up until around 10am, and the sun is already starting to set when I pick the girls up from school at 3:30pm), but what we didn't know was how often it would be gray and cloudy here. And the worst part in my opinion is that even when the skies are clear, we don't receive any direct sunlight in our neighborhood because we are in a valley and the sun doesn't get over the mountain. While I am admittedly longing for sunshine and warmth, we are doing our best to enjoy all that Alaska has to offer in the winter!