At Home in the Mountains

The big, sadistic run party took place on Sunday, December 9th, 2012. That's right. For some reason, back at the end of the summer, I let my husband talk me into voluntarily torturing myself for 26.2 miles to complete my first marathon ever. We got up at 4:30 in the morning, ate a quick breakfast, gathered our running gear, and dropped Maddy off for a day of fun with friends at 5:30a.m. Talk about some amazing friends to be willing to get up at 5:30a.m. to take care of Maddy so we could go kill ourselves. We arrived at the American Airlines center right on schedule to drop Tammy off to catch the bus for her relay. They changed the course from Fair Park to the Dallas Convention Center this year, so we were worried about parking but it all went great. We exited the freeway without spending more than about 5 minutes in traffic and came off practically into a parking lot right in front of the convention center. We went into the Convention Center to do our pre-race rituals and to ...

My life during finals week:

 A few pictures from Thanksgiving:  We put our tree up the last day of November. Maddy got to open her advent calendar and an ornament from Granna the night we put the tree up. I love putting the tree up. 70-80% of our ornaments are homemade and 90% have a special significance. There is the snowman cowboy we bought in Sedona on our honeymoon, there are the ornaments made by Aaron's great grandmother at the turn of the last century (1900). There are ornaments his mom made him when he was growing up, and the ornaments from my first Christmas. I still have an ice cream cone that I made with a silk Christmas ball ornament in 5th grade. The whole class chose a red ornament to make their ice cream cone except me and one other kid. We chose yellow. There are the ornaments I've made Maddy each Christmas and the ornaments Maddy's grandmothers have given her. I was pretty crushed this year because Maddy broke a sand dollar ornament to bits that was from my Sunday school t...

Just a quick update on a couple of things that happened this week: 1. We got an offer on our house in Ft. Collins! The inspection has to be done by the 13th. We are super excited that we have an offer and praying the inspection goes well and we can get the place sold. 2. Our home study is finally, officially, really complete and a physical copy is in our hands. We can now proceed to the next step with the adoption of getting all the paperwork together to submitted to the country. 3. We got to spend Thanksgiving with lots of different family members. I am very thankful for a great family. I'm blessed to have a great husband and a sweet daughter. On top of that I have amazing parents, aunts, uncles, cousins, in-laws, a beautiful niece and another nephew on the way. Even with all of that, I also have an amazing church family to be thankful for.

 Every year, on this day, I take a little time to reflect back on the journey that God has brought us on from the day we found out that Maddy's sonogram showed "abnormalities". In Sunday school a couple of weeks ago, we talked about how when God led the Israelites out of Egypt, he led them into a place where it looked like hope was over. They were either going to have drown themselves in the sea or be slaughtered by the Egyptians. Four years ago, I think that we had much that same type of hopeless, no where to go feeling. We didn't know what to do, where to go, how we were going to cope with life, or what was the best thing to do for our baby girl. But, just as God started the Israelites journey with a "hopeless" scenario and then led them out from slavery in a totally unexpected and amazing way, he has done the same with the challenges in our lives. Sure, the journey has been challenging and hard at times, but we are in a much better place today than we w...

Here are some things that have been going on the past few weeks. I love fall! Lots of outside time! The weather has been perfect except for the last couple of days have been too hot. Halloween! Maddy had a Noah's Ark party at school on Tues. On Wednesday we did trunk or treat at a church by our house and went trick or treating in the neighborhood a little bit. Maddy walked for everything and carried her pumpkin basket the whole time, even when it started getting weighed down with candy. When she got to tired to walk we called it quits on the trick or treating. With the beloved pumpkin. She would not let this pumpkin out of her sight or possession all day. "Chocolate!" Yeah, she knows the good candy when she sees it. Today, we made bird feeders. Our pepper plants have been producing like crazy. Thus, to quarts of pickled refrigerator peppers. Our front porch decorated for Halloween. The pumpkins have "mad faces" per Madd...

That's what a fire alarm sounds like going off at 5a.m. in your house on a Sunday morning. Most of you have probably heard about the little fire we had downstairs a couple of weeks ago. An aquarium light had a short in it and caught on fire. When the smoke alarms went off it was in flames. I got up first and went in to see what was going on. Talk about a bad feeling in the pit of your stomach. I saw the aquarium light was on fire (thought it was a heater at the time) and yelled at Aaron to get the fire extinguisher. We had never had a fire extinguisher in the house until about a month ago, when the home study safety inspection for the adoption required us to get one. So thank goodness for bureaucracy for once! I grabbed Maddy and a blanket and my phone and went outside on the front steps while Aaron put out the fire. I was just thinking that I should probably go ahead and call 911. I called down to Aaron and he said, "It's out!" He had to use the entire 5# fire exting...

Well New York City was never in my top 10 of places I wanted to visit someday; it really was never on the list of places I wanted to visit period. In fact, it might have almost been on the list of places I want to avoid going to at all possible costs, but I enjoyed it much more than I expected. Though I'm not in a great hurry to go back to the hustle and bustle of the largest city in the U.S., I wouldn't mind going back someday to finish seeing and doing several things that I wanted to do but didn't have time. The streets stunk most of the time and I got tired of the crowds, the lines, the noise, and the traffic. I would not want to live there but it is a really interesting place to visit and I think anyone would enjoy going there. Whether you're a history buff, theater buff, nature buff, or night-life lover, there is something for you to do and see and enjoy in New York. Heckscher playground in Central Park  We flew into La Guardia late on Thursday night and caugh...