Winter Fun, Las Vegas-style

Jonathan has had these last two weeks off to recharge the ol' batteries for Round 2 of Jon v. AEGD, and weeks ago he kept pestering...er, reminding me that we HAD to do a "Snow Day" during this vacation time.

Luckily with all the wet weather we've had here in the valley, Mt. Doom (aka Charleston) has been getting a TON of snow. We layered up and headed to higher ground and immediately found snow, snow, and more SNOW!!

We looked EVERYWHERE around here for a sled and couldn't find anything, so deciding to wing it we headed up there anyway. Luckily some nice people loaned us some cardboard (duh!) so we didn't have to keep using our bottoms to slide down the hill.

Rub a dub dub! Three Cardons on some cardboard! There they go!!

The kids LOVED our snow day, and everytime we slid to a stop Zachy would freak out and start crying and say, "Weee! Weeee!" and point up to the top of the mountain. He wanted to slide down again so he could yell "Weeee" some more!

Jonathan had so much fun that his reeeeally nice wife even let him go back up on a solo mission this Friday and test out his new snow shoes for a day.

A few nights later we decided to check out a place called the "Magical Forest" at Opportunity Village, which is a center for people with disabilities. It's basically several acres set up outdoors with TONS of lights, decorations, a choo choo (I asked one of the workers where the "choo choo" was, and he looked at me like I was crazy. "You mean the TRAIN?"), a carousel, and food stands with hot chocolate and other Christmas goodies for sale.

It was SUPER cold that night, but we braved the cold desert winds and the kids obviously loved the horsies on the carousel. Zachy also about had a fit over gettig to ride on the choo choo TRAIN.

All the proceeds go entirely to running Opportunity Village, so they have lots of high school aged kids volunteer and dress up. We even saw the governor of Nevada doing some publicity rounds, but he was't dressed up and this is not him in the costume.

Enjoying the beautiful lights before the freezing rain drove us home!!