Christmas 2010

We spent our Christmas vacation in Utah this year and had a great time.

On Christmas Eve we had a big family party with my mom's family. We had dinner, sang Christmas carols, had a pinata, danced, and played basketball. Julia loved the pinata. After her turn was over I had to pick her up so she wouldn't run in the way of the people hitting the pinata. I would let her down in between turns and she would take her little spoon and run up to the pinata and hit it again. We spent Christmas Day at my parent's house relaxing and happy to have all my family together for Christmas.

After Christmas we had my Grandpa Sandberg's funeral. He has not been in good health for a long time, so his passing was not a surprise. In fact, I think I was almost more happy for him to out of pain and back in heaven with my grandma than sad. We will miss him, but he lived a long fulfilling life and it was time for him to go back to our Heavenly Father.

He was a Korean War Veteran so we had a military funeral for him. All his sons and grandsons in the military wore their military dress uniforms, his coffin was draped with an American flag, a bugler played Taps, and the Panguitch Honor Guard gave a gun salute.

It was snowing during the entire graveside service.

After the funeral and luncheon we had a white-knuckle drive back home in a giant snow storm and then the next day headed up to Park City to be with Robert's family. We had opened our presents in Arlington before we left, so by the time Christmas came around Julia felt like a pro. She wanted to help everyone else open their late Christmas presents at the cabin.
Julia and Tyler are so cute together. I'm glad she has a cousin her age to play around with. Everything one of them did, they both had to do. We took them out in the snow a couple times and neither of them were crazy about it but they were at least calm when they sat together in the sled.
We had a Wheat family Olympics, but only ended up having two events, Memory (the game) and Ultimate Sledding (meaning slide down the hill and race back up). Robert and I won both the events, so I guess we are the Gold Medal winners! The second event kicked our butts. This is me collapsing at the finish line, which I think everyone did at the end. It was a big hill and the air was just so thin we could all hardly breathe.
Robert had fun carving a couch out of the five feet of snow on the back porch, but first he had to shovel off all the rest of the snow on the porch.
And of course we had fun snowmobiling and snowshoeing. This is Robert going through some fresh powder (which he had to do a lot of to make us a trail all the way into the cabin).