We woke up Christmas morning to find our power had gone out once again, likely from some snow laden evergreen branch snapping under the weight of the snow. It's been snowing here again all day, and to put this in perspective for those non-Pacific NW'ers, Seattle averages 3 inches of snow a year. Where we are at a higher elevation in the suburbs, I'd guess maybe we get even a couple more inches on average. Over the last 13 days, we've had about 16" of snow fall with very little melting, so all these 100' tall pine trees around our house are starting to snap their branches. The playset out back had a narrow miss when 3 large branches came down, taking out part of our pasture fence instead. While our house is pretty dark (though not cold, thanks to our generator), the girls have new Christmas toys to distract them from our second power outage this week.

 

We had our family Christmas last night with just the four of us, and we had a lovely time. We took a minute to recognize Phoebe's first Christmas with us, and tell the girls how lucky we are to have them here with us. By about 9:30, Zoe started to frantically get everyone into bed so as not to risk Santa possibly skipping us by, even coming down to check on Jamie and I a couple times ("Um, are you guys going to bed soon? Are you going to be asleep before midnight?"). We went downstairs by the light of a headlamp in the morning to see that Santa left behind 3 hula hoops for Zoe and a tricycle for Phoebe (don't let the camera flash deceive you, they were playing with these in the dark). So if we're lucky, maybe Santa has one last gift in store and can get our power restored before nightfall...