Christmas @ Big Bear

I know this is a little after the fact, but I thought I would post a few pics from our weekend at Big Bear. There wasn't alot of snow on the ground, but It was still definitely good to get up in the mountains. And the lack of snow didn't seem to bother most of these snow-starved Californians... they still lined their cars up at every wide spot in the road and flocked by the dozens to frolick around in little patches of crusty, dirty snow leftovers. It was amusing. At any rate, we kept a roaring fire going and lazed around the cabin most of the weekend stuffing our faces and playing foosball. On Christmas Eve it was about 50 degrees and we went to a tubing run, and then on Christmas the temp dropped to freezing and stayed there all day. The big bummer for the weekend was that we had to take Grandpa to the hospital on Christmas. Their doctor had told them they didn't need to take oxygen up, but because of the altitude change he started having congestive heart failure again, and we had to have the paramedics come to get him down the killer set of stairs at the cabin. They got his oxygen levels up at the hospital and just kept him in over night and he's doing fine now. The big fun for the weekend of course was springing the news about our baby in the making...that was fun. I thought we did a good job keeping it a secret up until Christmas Day - even with Jess eating constantly and nonchalantly dashing to the bathroom to throw up. Most of all we just enjoyed at least feeling like we were out in the woods again, smelling the pine trees and wood smoke and watching the critters... Ah, the simple life.