A Tradition of Epic Proportions

So, for as long as I have remembered, the children in my family have had a tradition of waking up our parents on Christmas morning.

The earlier, the better.

Well, ever since my older sister got married and left the roost, we may have gotten more...extreme...in our methods. For example, one year involved sending a brother through a downstairs window, to scale the exterorior walls to his window, climb through, and then fling a blaring alarm clock into my parents bedroom and then leaping from his bedroom window and scrambling back into the basement. Ah good times.

Another year involved another brother dressing up as Buddy the Elf and the siblings sneaking out to go wake up our sister and her family at 5am. Unfortunately, she didn't hear the doorbell. But we had fun being the only people on the freeway.

Last year, we snuck out another basement window (notice a pattern?), set up the ladder, and serenade our parents with an original song. One brother sang the song while playing the guitar, another held the ladder and offered back up vocals, and the rest of us danced around the ladder. My father rewarded our performance by flinging water on the singing brother.

This year, however, we strayed from tradition slightly. At 4:50am, we woke up, bundled up, and then snuck out through a window (it's the one time a year we can actually get away with doing it), grabbed a couple sleds, snuck them into a car and drove to the local sledding hill. And we went sledding at 5:30am. Best part was we didn't have to wait in line. After we had our fill of sledding, we jumped into the oldest brother's car and drove to his house where we watched a bit of a Christmas movie. We eagerly awaited the text that would come asking "where are you?"

At 6:30, we finally sent a text to our mom. She didn't answer. So we decided to sneak back home. Our older brother acted as a decoy as he took his son through a door and greeted our parents. The rest of us slid back into the basement window and ran back into the bedroom we all sleep in on Christmas Eve and jumped back into bed, quickly shedding all our snow gear.

My mom opened the door and said, "thanks for letting us sleep in! you guys slept late this year." We snickered evily to ourselves. We had fooled our parents.

However, our older siblings revealed our ploy to my parents later in the day when they commented on the facebook post I had made at 5:30am.

Either way, it was a lot of fun.

But I am a bit sleep deprived today.

Merry Christmas! and I promise I haven't died

Right...
So I haven't written since September...
Not much has happened since September...So I don't feel too guilty.
Okay, that's a lie...a lot has happened since September, but none of it is stuff that I feel the need to share with the world (hoorah for privacy).
So basically I am writing this post because I felt the need to write something...but I am not sure what...

In regards to the running...due to a family event I did not get to do the run in December that I wanted to, however, I am doing one in the spring...I just haven't decided which one yet.

Anywho...here are some photos from Salt Lake when I went up last week with some friends.

It wasn't a very good camera...but it still captured some of the spirit up there.

Merry Christmas