New Years :)

We spent New Years with at my sisters A's house with a fair showing of my family! The kids played with their cousins and friends and the adults chatted and ate and ate and laughed! Baby J stayed up HOURS passed his bed time and was still having fun when we left! My brother D and his wife A were here from Ab. with their 2 kids and it was really neat to see them again and see how much their kids had grown since we'd seen them last summer. My sister S and husband D were also here from Ab with their 2 kids and it was awesome to see them. I think the last time we saw them was Dad's 60th and I was amazed to find my nephew J is now taller then me at 13 years old!! He's also got a bit of peach fuzz going on there!! Their daughter A spend a part of the night giving 'horse rides' and the kids totally took advantage of her! She's such a sweet kid she couldn't say no!! My folks were there too.. so we were only missing 2 families. That's not bad out of 7 families!  K had some of his family there as well. It was fun to see them as well as we don't see much of them. Out of 6 they were missing 3. Fun full house!   We had a wonderful time and stayed until almost midnight.. we actually started out 2011 in the truck on the way home! After we put the kids to bed Papa and I went out and got the beef Bindy who'd been hanging for a while inside ready for hamburger-ing the next day.. this proved challenging as it was -25C ish and she was frozen solid! Papa ended up taking the chain saw and cutting her into 6 chunks.. The only other thing we could have done is wait for it to warm up. Even then it would have to be warm for quite a while to thaw a whole cow! We set them on tables by the wood stove over night and she was pretty soft by morning! I told Papa I felt like a sneaky person cutting up a beef in the middle of the night with a chain saw!! He referred to it as 'the chain saw massacre!' The little birds like chick-a-Dee's and woodpeckers loved it :) It wasn't until we were half way done that I realized that we were RIGHT by our wonderful neighbor Mike's bedroom!! Chain sawing like crazy people in the dark in the middle of the night! I felt better later on though when I remembered it was New Years after all and I'm pretty sure he wasn't home :)