On our way to the hospital, we picked up Lance. Lucy and I made snow angels in his front yard and then stood up and jumped up and down, flapping our arms to get rid of the snow all over us. Ricky just grinned and said, "How old are we?" Obviously old enough to go out and play without adult supervision.

Off we went to hospital hill. You can guess how we figured we were in a really convenient location to be doing something where we might hurt ourselves.

Ricky was the first to give it a try, selecting the cardboard as his weapon of choice. He ran with the cardboard and dove like he was trying to steal second base or something. Problem was, the cardboard stayed where it landed, but Ricky slid across it. Face plant in the snow.

Lucy tried the garbage can lid. It had a couple squared-off indentations in it though, and it wasn't much better.

So, the best sliding implement turned out to be the boogie board (like a mini-surf board made out of Styrofoam with nylon covering it). I took it and did the dive and slide thing and was able to go about five feet. Whee. So the process had to get a little more cooperative. What we ended up doing was having one person either sit on the board or dive with it, while someone else held the cord attached to it, and ran with it down the hill, basically pulling the person on the board as they slid along. It was really fun.

I thought about taking pictures, but that would've effectively made me more of an observer who had to be extra careful about not getting her camera wet or smashed. And I definitely wanted to be a participant.

After the sledding, we went back to Lance's place and he doled out wine to everybody else and rum and Coke to me. I had two drinks and then thought to call Deb. She had beaten me home by about an hour and found both Jake and me missing and was wondering where the hell we were. So we moved our little snow party over to our place. I was a bit foxed by then. I'm such a cheap drunk these days.

Somehow, I'm not exactly sure how ... I think we might've been talking about how big the house is ... I offered to show our guests the attic. So they got to see the St. Andrews cross. I demonstrated my snake whip cracking ability. And Ricky got me to Denzel out of his little satin bag. Deb and Jake come up (they'd been doing other stuff), Jake's got her jaw dropping over the fact that I brought everybody up to the attic in the first place, and Deb asks "Does this mean you told them the family secret, too?"

So then we HAD to tell them. But not until after dinner. Deb whipped up a sesame and ginger chicken stir-fry that rocked. She also continued to keep the wine flowing for the wine drinkers, but I switched to plain Diet Coke. R & L shared a special Millennium magnum of Budweiser with us. I did have some of that. It was a little flat, but still tasted good. Lance made his excuses and went home to finish cleaning his house, which is what he was doing when we abducted him for sledding purposes.

After dinner, Deb revealed the "family secret," and Lucy and Ricky's response was pretty anticlimatic, as we suspected it would be. Lucy had wondered about us when Deb and Jake went on their bicycle trip in the spring. Ricky had said "Naaaaah" to her musings.

We wound up the evening with Ricky giving Jake a luscious looking back massage. He used to be a massage therapist. They hung out long enough for Sara to get home from work (after 11:00 p.m.), so Sara got to find out that we were "out". Everybody left around 11:40. That means Jake and I spent almost eight hours playing with Lucy and Ricky yesterday. We love them.