Frozen Dirt

The other day I went out to go to work and found this:


A half inch of ice completely encasing my way to and from work. It took about a half hour to get through, and the experience made me fondly remember the winters in Utah with light, fluffy, dry snow. I remember clearing the windshield by just turning on the wipers! Wow! If I'd tried that, we'd and already be on the third new pair in a month! Anyway we made it through and to work with the help of the 4wd.

But for all the trouble it causes (breaking tree-limbs, pulling down power lines, turning the roads into skating-rinks, and making raccooncicles) it is pretty, here are a few pics:


If you kick the branches they shatter, which is also pretty sweet.

Also, we put up our tree (not frozen), and here's how it looks:



With presents and everything! I must say, we did pretty good for our first tree, and it's a new experience for me to have a real one instead of fake, but the pregnant wife insisted, and what she wants-she gets. However, I'm not sure what to do with it when we're done... The only thing I've ever done with a real tree is take it out west of the lake and burn it... I'll have to do some looking.

In other news, the other night we had some friends over and made graham-cracker-candy-houses and they turned out pretty good! Tiff and I made a brown igloo.



We only realized afterward that igloos are white so we could've just covered it in frosting, but sometimes we're a little slow. Notice the polar bear? Nice, huh? Everyone else's turned out pretty cool too:


Also, today it was 0 degrees outside and felt like -23. We stayed inside with the windows and blinds shut. Church was cancelled due to too much ice in the chapel parking lot. The one time we did open the door, the icy air came sweeping in our house and it looked like we were opening the freezer, so we shut it. Merry Christmas!!!

Finally!

Some of you may already know and this may be news to others of you, but we have a little announcement to make...

Hooray!!!


I feel so blessed to have a wonderfully supportive husband. Especially during pregnancy when things have been kinda rough at times. Braden has been so patient when I was nauseous during those first 14 weeks and I never wanted to make dinner. He made special trips to the grocery store to get me my craving of the moment. He even let me use his Nalgene bottle as a barf-bag on a bus ride in Japan (and yes, he still uses it...we ran it through the dish-washer of course!). And he has never complained. This is true love! I honestly don't know what I did to deserve to have my Mr. Amazing, but I thank my Heavenly Father for Braden daily.
(I had to have a plug for Braden because he really is incredible -- did you see the couch?! -- and I know he is going to be a fantastic father!)

Here's a picture of our baby at 17 weeks...


Isn't that profile just so cute?! We get to have another ultrasound in another 8 weeks to check on some stuff. We're excited to be parents and so grateful for this opportunity!
(We'll try to get more pictures up if our scanner starts cooperating...)

Project Re-upholster

If we've learned anything in our close to year of marriage, it's that we can take on the world and make it yell "UNCLE!" Our most recent adventure included an old couch, roadkill, and holiday dreams come true. We were sick of our futon in the front room, so when our home-teacher told us he had an old couch in Nauvoo, we jumped at the chance. We headed out on a Friday after work, picked up the couch, ran over Rudolph (or maybe it was Blitzen?) on the way home, got the couch in the apartment, and this is what we had:

We looked at it for a minute and said to ourselves "self, I bet we can flip this couch!" And so we did. Here's a shot of during the re-upholstery:

Tiff showing off her domesticity:

And the finished product!

Notice the detail...
The Christmas tree was not a part of the re-upholstery, but just a side project. However, it kind of makes the couch "pop", don't ya think?

In other news - I can't help but say I'm surprised by the number of people that have asked me if I kept the deer I ran over (it just cracked the bumper a little), and I don't think they were joking. I guess it didn't get tore up too bad, but still I like to think I just gave the coyotes a Christmas feast. Besides, I didn't want to mess up the couch, and dressing it in the front room probably would have gotten us evicted. Merry Christmas!

Winter

We came back from a fun Thanksgiving trip out to Zion National Park in Utah and saw this...

Well, actually from the plane it was just a white-out. So that picture is what we saw the next morning out our front door. Here's some more pictures of Peoria right now.

If only there were mountains here to ski/snowboard on! (But then again, I guess I'm not supposed to snowboard this winter anyway...)