So, my wife left me for a week during the holiday season. I've tried not to cry and whine too much, but if the most wonderful person in the world left you all alone for a week you would be depressed as well. The absence of my wife coupled with the long standing absence of ESPN in my life (almost more than I can bear) has me in pretty bad shape. It makes me want to go fishing. What? No wife = no permission needed? SWEET! Me in Santa hat

Doing this



Turns into this

It makes me smile

So, some of the perch were still kicking after being out of the water for 4 hours, so I tried to revive them in our bathtub to see if I could keep them fresh for an extended period of time. Some of them were able to swim side ways, but after two hours of no improvement, I decided it was time to bust out the knife and fillet them. They were delicious. My buddy, Brian, and I caught over 50 by lunch. I caught 5 rainbows between 13-16 inches, and the rest were perch 8-11 inches. Twas a good day. Now, I'm missing my wife.

Jeebers, I love you! Oh, I did wash the tub.... :)

FHE activity

Blank wooden ornaments from Michaels, on sale for about 20 cents each

Kevin gets his painting on...

Our first home, complete with house number 586. Isn't Kevin talented with a paintbrush?

All of our ornaments finished. Kevin also gets credit for the flames on the side of Santa's sled :)

Our first Christmas tree in our first house. Lots of firsts this year. Thanks to Cheryl for helping us get this bargain Black Friday tree. It was 70% off! And it's the perfect size for our small but growing ornament collection.

In tribute to last year's Christmas tree (see below), we used the same "star" at the top of our tree this year. A gold gift bow. Our tree is special to us, even if the decorations are a little ghetto... I mean eclectic.

Our live Christmas tree from last year. It even had a heartbeat and hair. Those kind are hard to find. :)

ONE YEAR!

This is a little late, but on December 6th, Kevin and I celebrated our first wedding anniversary. Since our anniversary was a Sunday, we wanted to do something special on Saturday. We headed up to the mesa with our snowshoes, only to find that there wasn't deep enough snow. But, we were there and we were NOT going to leave until we played in the snow, dangit.

Shortly after we found a place to wander, Kevin was walking in front of me and stopped and turned around with a really serious look on his face. "We are on a mission..." he said, "to find the perfect Christmas tree."
We did find a lot of pretty trees that were perfectly shaped, but way too tall to ever fit in a house. It was just something to distract us from the bitter cold wind, since we already have a tree and we didn't have a permit to cut a live one down anyway. We finally settled to take a family picture in front of this tree. Our Nalgene was our tripod for this photo, hence the worm's eye view. My coat is so puffy you really can't see Michael, which is a shame. I would have taken it off, but it was about 19 degrees outside, and probably close to zero with wind chill. Brrrr.

My head was hidden inside a beanie, scarf, sweatshirt hood, and my coat hood. That's a sweet combination if you're ever looking to completely wipe out your peripheral vision.

Here's my hubby-poo. I caught him with his eyes closed, but he's still super hot. This past year has really been the best year of my life... so far. Kevin is the love of my life and my best friend. We have such a good time together. I'm so grateful for everything he does for me. The snow was anywhere from a foot to two feet deep where we were hiking and Kevin went ahead of me to blaze a trail so I could walk in his footsteps. He always takes such good care of me.

If you want to know just how happy I was to be celebrating my anniversary with Kevin, just look at the joy... it's written all over my face, er eyes.

Nesting

I've spent several hours this month working with a sewing machine, spray paint, exacto knives, duct tape, and good ol' fashioned creativity to make some serious headway on projects for Michael. I'm sick of how long it takes to upload individual pictures to the blog, so I'm catching up with collages. I had an outdated dresser and nightstand that a coworker from Montana gave me, which I purged of drawers, sanded and repainted, and created shelves and drawers for. The dresser will double as a changing table once everything's complete. I also inherited a free mirror with a gold frame from Kevin's grandma and it got spraypainted to match. The shelves and drawers are made from foam insulation, which was about $11 for a giant 4' by 8' sheet, and the fabric I used to cover the shelves was on 70% off clearance! I'm pretty proud of myself for the money I'm saving. Kevin helped me cut out the foam pieces and construct everything. You can see him in one of the pictures. The other project up there is a felt winter hat for Michael that I patterned after an existing hat. It was tricky to figure out how to sew all the pieces together in order to end up with a fully lined hat that had no unfinished seams showing. Kevin and I really love it and think it will look adorable on our little man. It reminds us of a court jester's hat, kinda funny. I'll be sure to get pictures of the finished nursery furniture up here later, but right now it's still in the garage and too heavy for me to move by myself.

Turkey Bowl

Our Thanksgiving was spent in West Jordan this year with Kevin's parents. We had a delicious meal thanks to Cheryl and probably could have fed about 20 people with the food we had for the four of us. Kevin's brother and sister and their families were also in town and we got to go bowling to celebrate our nephew Caden's birthday. We have 11 nieces and nephews on Kevin's side, and all were there except the 2 girls that live in Virginia. It was so much fun to see them play with each other and bowl. Even our 2 year old nephew was bowling, although he was very independent and would just grab a ball and send it down a lane at the most random times. He had to have help after a few of his balls ran out of steam and were left sitting half way down the lane.

It was so nice to have the weekend to relax and spend time with family and eat. And eat. And eat some more. Kevin also took me to watch him play ultimate frisbee on Thanksgiving morning and I was able to meet a lot of his long-time Salt Lake buddies. They've had the tradition of playing ultimate on weekends for years, and Kevin was like a kid in a candy store to be back with his friends and playing one of his favorite sports. Good times.