The Magnolia Chronicles: It takes a village and our first bloody accident

I really wanted to share this picture. One of our neighbors is helping situate Katie on the sled while Jim was shoveling our driveway. It really characterizes for me the family feel of our new street and neighborhood. All the cul-de-sac kids congregated on the neighboring houses' driveway (which our neighbor helpfully did not shovel) to sled and they had a great time. Katie, who would usually be very hesitant to participate in something as potentially scary as sledding, watched the other kids and then jumped right in. She even went fast enough to get some air over the ski bump the older kids put at the bottom of the hill. In keeping with the friendly nature of our court and the fact that I love to bake (especially to feed people goodies!), I made cookies and Jim and Katie delivered about 6 dozen fresh out of the oven chocolate chip cookies around the cul-de-sac. I understand they were quite appreciated. :)

The other thing that happened on our wild sledding day was Katie's first bloody accident while playing. It was almost comical to watch. She had gone down the sledding hill very fast but had slowed down considerably at the end (the "hill" is well designed to allow for stopping at the bottom) when she started sliding toward a woman who was walking away from the house. Katie wasn't moving very fast by the time they collided but there was nothing we could do to stop it as the ground was solid ice where they were. The woman went down on her bottom but, since Katie wasn't going very fast, I didn't expect there to be any problems. Somewhere in the shuffle, Katie's face must have been pushed into the ice because when she looked up, she was crying and blood was coming out of her mouth. Fortunately, it wasn't much and stopped quickly. When I looked in her mouth I couldn't even find where the blood was coming from. When I asked her if she was hurt or scared she replied, "Scared." A day later, her face is definitely all scraped up with red scrapes on her upper lip, nose, and right cheek. Jim, of course, happened to have the camera in hand to document the crash.

The air.