Christmas Vacation

Christmas was great! We had a lot of fun and saw a lot of family. We have started a tradition of trying to see all of our family in a 24 hour period. We go out to Jerome on Christmas Eve for dinner and some present opening with my mom and dad and sisters. Then we go to Schwabedissen's in Kimberly early Christmas morning to open presents and eat breakfast. We stay there until after Christmas lunch/dinner and then we go to Gary and Heidi's for dessert and games Christmas evening. We got to see just about everybody, except for Nate and Sara who couldn't make it because of the road conditions. I completely understand though: better safe than sorry.

Here are some pictures from Christmas Eve. I forgot to take any on Christmas day so I'll have to get some from Teddi!

The first week of my Christmas vacation is over. I woke up this morning with a desire to do some deep cleaning. I have cleaned out most of the closets in the house, vaccuumed, dusted, and polished the furniture. Jake helped by doing the dishes, sweeping the floor, taking out the garbage and helping me do some heavy lifting. Now that the house is clean I am going to enjoy my week off by putting up my feet and reading some good books. Oh, and I may make a loaf of bread of two with my shiny, new kitchen aid!

O Christmas Tree, O Christmas Tree

It's time to start the Christmas countdown!! I have resisted the urge to listen to Christmas music or make mile-long-lists for as long as I could. Thanksgiving was great. We did all of the traditional Thanksgiving things: stuffed ourselves silly, took long naps, and watched football, but now it's time to delve into the Christmas spirit. (I even gave Thanksgiving the respect of waiting until Saturday before I began changing out my decorations.)

Jake and I broke down and bought a fake tree this year. I like the smell and authenticity of a real tree, but they are soo messy and too much work. We went all over town checking prices against quality. It took several hours before we finally found "our" tree. We knew we couldn't have a huge tree- our living room is only 8 feet tall, but we had never even considered the width of the tree. And for some reason it looked a lot smaller in Lowe's than it does in our living room. It took some rearranging of furniture but we finally got it to fit. While Jake did all the hard manual labor, I made hot chocolate and picked out the perfect Christmas music (Noel by Josh Groban). We had a lot of fun decorating, even though I have decided I need more ornaments since this tree is so big.

Jake (my hunk) put the tree up all by himself, he even put my star on top. We thought we had a 9 foot ceiling (we didn't measure) and so we bought a 7.5 ft tree. Oops. The star is only one inch from the ceiling.

Frank the Cat approves of the new addition to the living room. He wasn't sure at first, because he doesn't like change, but I guess its growing on him. We hung ornaments with bells near the bottom so they make noise when he bumps into them. He leaves it alone when we turn the lights off, but when they go on he loves to cuddle up underneath.

Thanks Sara

A special thanks to Sara for designing and editing our picture! Her photography skills and Photoshop skills are unparalleled. :-)

Photo Tag

Laural tagged me and gave me these instructions:



You go to your pictures folder, choose the 4th picture folder, and then the 4th picture. Post it.

Okay, but Laural I am just going to warn you, I don't think you'll like this. However, that was one of my favorite college memories. Yea for roadtrips!!!!

I tag Alex and Hailie.

Billings or Bust!

I love road trips! There's something very exciting about getting up early in the morning, packing the car, and hitting the road. It's an adventure, a quest. It's fun.




We took a road trip this weekend. I had Friday off anyway, and Jake had Monday off anyway, so I got a sub for Monday and Jake took a personal day of Friday and we headed to Billings, Montana to visit Nate, Sara, and Zsolt. We left around 7:00 on Friday morning (Jake wanted to leave by 4:00 but luckily that didn't happen, I do have limits to my fun). We took the freeway up past Idaho Falls and then in Dillon, Mt we took a highway for a while to trip some miles off the trip. We stopped and ate peanut butter and jelly sandwiches in a small town off the freeway. It was cold and windy but we got out to stretch our legs and sat together at a picnic table to eat. Cozy.

Isn't it beautiful?

This took us a few shots to perfect.

It was wonderful to see everybody. We had a wonderful time. We cuddled Zsolt, watched movies, cuddled Zsolt, read books, let Sara take a billion pictures of us, cuddled Zsolt some more, played video games, went to Hobby Lobby (that store is so amazing it could be a blog on its own), cuddled Zsolt, ate lots of good food, played with the dogs, and then cuddled Zsolt. Did I mention Zsolt? He may have been the center of attention just a little bit. He was really good about being handed around the room like a hot potato except that we weren't trying to get rid of him, we were trying to see how long we could hold him before someone would steal him from us.

Fun times!

Hi sleepy!

It was fun to be so close to Nate and Sara. I would move to Billings in a heart beat if we could see them more often. But as much fun as it was to see them, it was exciting to jump back in the car and speed off into the sunset. :-) Haha. Seriously we ended up driving into the sunet though. It was blinding. Tuff enough!

Holiday countdown . . .

The holiday season finally started when Halloween snuck up on us. Now Halloween is over and its only a matter of moments before it is Thanksgiving and then Christmas. I've been told that Wal-mart had a huge, decorated Christmas tree in the entrance of their store this morning. Ew! Halloween has only been over for a few hours! I think it is so sad that all of the stores skip right over Thanksgiving and go straight for Christmas. Personally, my favorite holiday of the year is Thanksgiving (right next to the Fourth of July). Although I think I like it because it's not as commercialized, so if the stores did recognize it more it might diminish my enjoyment of the holiday. I love to decorate for Thanksgiving. I collect pilgrim sets. I have at least five sets of them. I am trying to limit myself to one set a year, but sometimes I can't help myself if they're cute enough. Also, I made an apple pie this morning, just to get myself in the baking mood. I'm glad I did too. It tasted good but it didn't set up right so I'll need to practice and get it down to an art before the big Thanksgiving dinner! Yum!

It's beginning to look a lot like . . . Halloween?

I woke up this morning to a huge surprise. . . lots and lots of snow. I looked out of my window before I put my glasses on and couldn't believe my eyes, so of course I grabbed my glasses and looked again. Sure enough, there was snow all over my front yard.

So . . . I was going to post pictures of the outside of my house with the corn stalks and the fall decorations but I guess you get to see the snow instead. The apple trees that were bowing down under the weight of the apples are now bowing with snow and apples that I didn't pick fast enough. My rose bush hasn't bloomed in months because of the heat. Last week the weather finally cooled off enough and the bushes began to bloom again.

The best part is that it is almost 6:00 p.m. and the snow is still coming down! Do I dare get my hopes up for a snowday on October 13th? We'll have to wait and see. . . :-)

Enjoy the pictures!

Potato Harvest

Thursday and Friday were teacher inservice days and I had the days off so I went out to Jerome to help with harvest. I got to stand at the dirt eliminator and pick dirt clods out from amidst the potatoes. I only get to help for a few days each year so I always treasure this time. Picking clods of dirt off of a conveyor belt that is moving rather quickly is a great time to do some self-reflection and discover some self truths.
I learned that my hand-eye coordination really needs some work, (just because I could see a dirt clod did not always mean I could grab the dirt clod.) I also learned that there are muscles in the back of my legs that do not like it when I stand in one place for several hours in a row. You know in Breaking Dawn when Bella has to learn to move around and fidget so that she blends in with humans? Well I tried to pretend I was a vampire and stand without moving my legs. It's harder than it sounds and mostly because of those muscles that begin to scream.

I also learned that cousins are a wonderful blessing. I have some pretty awesome ones too. Annie and Donna are troopers. They work hard and never complain. They look forward to helping with the harvest as much as I do. Annie is optimistic and happy-go-lucky. She is not fazed by the thought of more work or potato trucks waiting in line to be unloaded. Donna is a good counter part. She plans ahead and likes to know what's next. She gets bored easily and likes to entertain. I couldn't ask for better people to work with.

I also learned how important family really is. Harvest time is always a great time to be with family. Everybody has a job to do and it makes us feel good to be needed. Even those people who couldn't take off time from their regular jobs usually come out after work to help. Alex worked on the harvester in the field, and Jake came out to stand on the dirt eliminator with me. I was glad that he came out to help, and so were Annie and Donna. There is something wonderful about having him come up and give me a big hug even though I am covered head to toe in dirt. (That's true love!) The girls love to see him too and they fought over who got to stand next to him on the dirt eliminator. In the end they put him between them and I had to stand on the other side. :-) I don't have any pictures of Jake out there because by that time it was dark and we were working by large flood lights, plus I was too tired to think about taking pictures.

Yea for Harvest!!!

Paul Newman- we'll miss you!

A Tribute to Paul Newman






Paul Newman died today at age 84. The first movie I ever saw him in was Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. I fell in love. He was a very talented actor and shall be greatly missed. (And who can resist those eyes?)

I Love Fall

I love this time of year. I look forward to it all year long. The first day of autumn was this week and I went all out on my decorations. My dining room looks like the Real Deals showroom. (If you've never been to a Real Deals, I feel bad for you). I made my dad cut down stalks of corn and send them home with Jake so I could tie them to the front porch.
The weather has been perfect fall weather. The sky has been blue and cloudless but the temperature is cool: light sweater weather and jeans. Too cold for shorts, but too warm for a sweatshirt. Beautiful. The branches on the apple tree are bowing all the way to the ground, a waterfall of red apples. The leaves on the trees are going to start turning colors soon, my candy bowl is full (for the second time this month) of Halloween candy, and the students (and I) are settling in to a routine at school.
Life is good. It's fall.

Youth Cultural Celebration

Yesterday was amazing!! The Youth Cultural Celebration is finally over and it ended with a bang. For anyone who doesn't know, the youth of 14 Magic Valley stakes learned and performed a history of southern Idaho through song and dance. As a beehive advisor I was priviledged to help the girls in my ward learn an Italian dance. It has been several months of practice and stress but it paid off. President Thomas S. Monson, President Henry B. Eyring, and Elder Quintin L. Cook were all there to watch. We were literally just mere feet from them. Amazing! Everyone did a great job. They knew the steps, they knew their entrances and extis, they had their costumes ready to go, they were beautiful.

It was kind of an interesting experience for me because I was seeing everything from a leader's point of view. The Jerome Stake was camped out near by and I kept seeing leaders from my youth who kept asking what I was doing there. I had to explain over and over that I was an adult leader now too.

The final countdown to the performance started on Friday night with the first of three dress rehearsals. We arrived at the Filer Fairgrounds at 4:00, changed into costumes, and applied make-up. (I'm also the costume coordinator for my ward so my responsibility also included keeping track of costumes and bringing the make-up). At 7:00 we began our performance for parents who came to watch. We didn't get home until 10:30 that night. We were back at the fairgrounds by 9:30 the next morning to do it all over again, twice. We ran through the whole performance in the morning, had lunch (sandwiches from Subway), ran through the whole performance again in the afternoon, had dinner (salad and nachos), and then dressed and prepared for our performance in front of the Prophet. Everyone held together well. Nobody had any nervous breakdowns, nobody got cranky, sick, or injured. By far the best part of the night was when the girls came running off the stage, huge grins spread across the face, saying over and over "I did it! I remembered my steps! I saw the Prophet, he was clapping for us!" What a wonderful experience.

School is starting!

School starts tomorrow! Kindof. I get to go in and start working on my classroom. I will have a whole day to dust off bookshelves, rearrange desks, and -- my favorite-- put bulletin boards together. :-) I'll post pictures when we get our camera fixed. I still need to do some school supply shopping but that's fun too!

First Time Blogger

I'm still not sure how I feel about blogging, but I figure that I can't really have an opinion until I try it for myself. So, I am setting up a blogspot for Jacob and myself and we will just have to see how it goes. Wish me luck!