My brother Mason is leaving on Friday to be a professional water skier in Germany for 8 months. I know that sounds like I am making stuff up, but it is true. It is going to be such an awesome experience for him, but we are going to miss him an awful lot. So my dad decided to put together a little family party for him.

Of course, my family never plans anything in advance, so on Saturday afternoon, I received this as a picture message.

Because my family is awesome, we all automatically RSVP’d without even thinking it was weird in any way. We also clarified that this could include snow sculptures and that my dad was the judge. Andrew and I put on our thinking caps and came up with a plan for our sculpture.

So Andrew, Mac and I drove down on Sunday to attend this “not soiree.”

Here we are listening to the rules. My dad had not only started a fire in the fire pit (where he was cooking a pot of chili for later) but he had also set up a snack table with coffee and hot chocolate.

After my dad said go and everyone but Bob and Andrew took off running to find our locations, we all started to shovel like crazy people.

Bob came prepared with plenty of supplies. Of course, we were all quite secretive about our plans. Or, at least, most of us were.

Of course everyone had to alternate working with playing with Mac.

Mason was even serious enough to bust out a saw to prepare his props.

She is a Minnesota baby for sure! Mac actually did pretty well as long as we gave her some toys and let her eat snow.

After a while though, she wanted to go in. So the head judge of the snowman competition took her inside to play. I was able to take this sneak shot around the corner while they read Curious George.

Here is Andrew gathering puddle water to mix up with food coloring to jazz up our sculpture. I think this picture shows that Andrew has truly become a part of the Tuohy family. He is willingly gathering dirty, muddy puddle water to decorate a snow sculpture all while wearing overalls.

Bob standing back to admire his structure.

As you can see, it was very serious business.

Ta-da! Andrew and I made a Jabba the Hutt snow sculpture. For Christmas, every single thing my family gave Andrew was Star Wars themed. So we decided to continue that for the competition.

Molly made a construction worker. It even had a ponytail and that thing on the left is apparently all construction stuff that I didn’t understand.

Mason’s was a water skiing scene. The front yellow thing was the boat and coming over the other snow thing was a Buzz Lightyear on water skis. The other little toys on the right are the audience.

Here is Bob’s sculpture. It was a Mac sized fort, he said.

My mom made a simple, but colorful sculpture that proclaimed her love for the family.

Here is the chili cooking in the fire pit. A few years ago, I spent an entire day helping my dad pour this beautiful concrete fire pit.

They asked me to take a picture and then spent forever to actually pose for it. So I just started snapping pictures.

Here is the cute picture. Bob wanted to make sure the spoon got in the picture.

Here were the results as decided on by my Dad. Yes, Bob won his category because his had the most bucket shapes.

We had a delicious lunch. I’m not sure you can tell, but we only had half a high chair available, so we used a belt to hold her in the chair.

Mac has started to give kisses and despite the fact that they are sloppy ones, a Grandma doesn’t care 🙂

“No kisses Zippy, I have some boogers!”

We made sure to get a nice picture of Mac with her Uncle Mason. She will change a lot in the 8 months he is gone!