Oh! How I Missed You So!

I haven't been to Colorado in I don't know how many years.  Probably four.  Maybe five.  But nestled in the mountains of Colorado, in a tiny town named Paonia, live my wonderful grandparents.  On Tuesday morning, the kids and I piled into my parents' van with my dad, Jeremy, and my mom, and took the eight hour drive to see them.  They are my dad's mom and dad.  Grandpa Sharp has Parkinson's disease.  He also has been diagnosed with Alzheimer's.  He see things that aren't there.  Yesterday, at lunch, he said there was a skunk outside and wondered if it had left prints in the snow.  Grandma doesn't humor him.  It's cute.
We arrived at about 5:30 p.m. on Tuesday evening, and Grandma made us some pizza for dinner.  The kids were ungrateful little scallions and were upset that there wasn't just a cheese pizza.  I told them to pick off the pepperonis.  That made Kaleb pout.  He does that.  It's annoying.  Then we unpacked the car and hung out together.
It snowed all day on Wednesday.  My dad estimates they got a foot of snow.  Twelve inches!  That's crazy!  The kids played all day in it with Jeremy.  They got on top of the cellar and threw things off of it.  Apparently they should not have done that.  Come spring, Grandma is going to have to re landscape the whole area.  Sometimes I am appalled by my children's behavior.  I told my dad to take them with him when he goes back, and make them help.  That would be awesome.  But I didn't know.  I just told them not to throw rocks because I didn't want them to hit Kaleb with them.  My dad was mad.  They all had a snowball fight.  The kids decided their grandpa was not some one they wanted to have a snowball fight with.  He can throw the snow to far, and hard.  :D  That made me giggle.  After Kaleb got tired of having a snowball fight with his brothers, he made a snowman.  It's super cute.  But the next day, Zachary accidentally knocked it down when he threw a snowball at Jeremy, and missed.
Wednesday was also Grandpa Sharp's 83rd birthday.  We had pot roast for lunch/dinner with mashed potatoes and corn and biscuits.  Yummy!  Except for the roast.  I just don't like that much red meat.  But the boys and everybody else loved it, so it must have been yummy.  We had cake and ice cream, and Grandpa tried to tell us that we had already said the prayer on the meal.  Grandma kept telling him we hadn't and he needed to wait to eat.  It made me giggle.  My grandma takes excellent care of my grandpa.  He's hard to handle sometimes.  He said to my mom Thursday, "I can't seem to figure out why my legs don't work any more."  He's so sweet.
Thursday was less exciting.  The kids played in the snow a little bit in the morning, but it was just too cold, so they came in after awhile.  My dad got their tractor started, but felt it was too cold to take the kids for a ride.  But shh!  Don't tell them!  We just didn't mention a tractor ride for the rest of the day, and they forgot all about it.  We're sneaky like that.  We mostly watched TV with grandpa, and watched some movies we brought.  We also played about three or four hands of Go-Fish.  I was tired of Go-Fish after awhile.  I tried to help Grandma as much as she would let me.  She felt like we were her guests so she needed to take care of us, and kept apologizing for always having a list of chores to do when we came.  We really don't mind.  Grandparents are wonderful people.  They are the only people in the world who love you simply because you were born.

 Up Spanish Fork Canyon in Spanish Fork, Utah there is a new state of the art rest stop.  It's awesome.  It has a train.  My parents had heard about it on the news so much that they just had to stop and have lunch at it.  It was pretty nice.

 This is the play area for pets and children to run around.

When we got there, I had the boys get a picture with my Grandpa.  He's so cute.

Here is the house.  It's cute.  I always forget that it is bigger than it looks.

Here is my Grandpa checking out the card I made him.  I could tell he really liked it. :)

Here are my grandparents together.  Grandpa had just blown out the candles on his cake.  I wasn't sure if he would be able to.  Grandma kept prompting him to, but he didn't seem to get it at first.

My beautiful Grandmother played us the song she and Grandpa used to dance to at all the dances they went to.

 You can really see the snow coming down in this picture.

Zach and Riley on top of the cellar.  My dad told them they shouldn't stand on it.  It could cave in.  But I just think he didn't want them up there.

Snowball fight!

Let the wild rumpus start!

You better watch it!

Okay, Zach!  I am tired of you dumping snow on my head!

So I will do something else.

He is pretty proud of his creation.  Two rocks for eyes, and a baby carrot for the nose.  He said, "I need a carrot!"  So I said, "Okay, I will go inside and get you one."  My dad got him one out of the fridge for me.  He did great, and mostly all by himself, too!

We'll just call him "Snow".

This is truly a winter wonderland.

I went outside Wednesday morning to take a picture of Grandma's mountains, but they were missing.

Thursday, they came back.  And they are majestic.

The sun peaked his head out for a bit before it started snowing again on Thursday.

A little patch of blue sky before the storm.

While we were playing Go-Fish, there were so many chickadees outside.  I had to take about 40 pictures of them playing.

But I will just show you these two.

The horses didn't really like my hanging around.  But I love this shot.