grab a cup of coffee...

So I know I haven't written on my blog in a while, and I usually do at least once a week. Well what happened was, first of all Christmas stuff was going on: we had our church's annual Christmas Eve Play that Jordan and I were doing the music for, and then after that we went to the Carl's house to celebrate the Eve together. Then we went to bed anxiously awaiting Christmas the next day-especially since the Landers (Jordan's oldest sister and her famly) were going to be there!! (They recently moved away to Kansas b/c he took a Senior Pastor position there). Anyway, so we got up bright and early at 6am on Christmas! Funfun!!! Then we opened presents there for about 6 hours!! Sounds like forever, but it was very fun. There were 4 kids under the age of 7 and 6 adults, so that is why. Then we went over to my parents house and did another Christmas with them-also lots of fun, but did not take as long. It was so great to see all of both sides of our family, we were very blessed to have that. We got an overabundance of very thoughtful, surprising and wonderful gifts that we are SO thankful for!!
Then, the next day was my Birthday! You would normally get excited about this, and I WAS excited. I was so excited about going over to the Carl's where my parents and his parents would be to play games. But, to my dismay, right before we left our house I started feeling sick. I threw up, twice. Well, I was thinking-ok, I had taco bell for lunch, maybe its just food poisoning. So I decided to tough it out and go on over to the Carl's. Well in the 45 minutes it takes to get there I threw up about 5 or 6 more times...so, NOT food poisoning. I felt absolutely horrid. We get to their house, I walk in, and SURPRISE it's a party for me!!! With all of my family-brothers, sisters, parents, etc. I was overcome with emotion because I had literally just thrown up in the yard, and here I am all surprised that I just broke down in tears. How sad is that? I could tell that they had worked hard on the party b/c it was decorated all cute and everyone was there, I felt so terrible-for many different reasons. After hurling about 6 more times in the next hour, I had to crash my own party. Jordan took me back home to throw up in the comfort of my own home. I hated that that happened! And to top it off, I found out that that night ALL of the rest of the Carl family (excluding Jordan) which is about 9 people got the SAME sickness later that evening. So that was not the best weekend.
However, that Sunday all the Carl's mustered up the courage to go to Medieval Times together=and it was a blast!!! Then I had to pack the next day to go to VEGAS with the Kirby family. We left early Tuesday morning.
We had a lot of fun being together in Vegas. Notice I didn't say Vegas itself was fun, it was more that we were all together. Vegas has been fun in the past, but there were just too many people there-it was way more crowded than I prefer. And I think we were all poor b/c it was after Christmas so we couldn't do much gambling, haha. For New Year's Eve we got to watch that Robbie Madison jump over the replica Arch de Trump in front of the Paris hotel. Then, after my brother Matt won the poker jackpot (woohoo!!) we went outside on the strip of Las Vegas where over 300k people were standing to watch the fireworks! It was a great fireworks show-and kind of neat to have a New Year's experience like that. But the following events were NOT enjoyable. Imagine the Las Vegas strip with hundreds of thousands of people on it, and it is CLOSED off until 3am. Then imagine all of these people wanting to go back to their hotels in taxi's. Ha, what a joke. We probably walked a mile, and still no cab, but plenty of people that need one. Finally we found one, and when we told him where we needed to go (which is only 2miles away) just drove off and left us. About an hour and a half after all of this, we finally got a cab to take us to our hotel-sigh of relief.
The next day we took Jordan to see Hoover Dam. It was pretty neat to see again. What a magnificent structure. It was fun to drive around in the car together and see the actually beautiful side of Nevada, especially after being in the perverted muck of the vegas strip. We also tried to take him to Red Rock Canyon, but it was closed for New Years Day. We did get to see some of it, and it was gorgeous. We celebrated my oldest brother Josh's birthday that evening at a steak house. It was a nice evening even though we kind of wandered around aimlessly for awhile.
We came back Friday and picked up our little doggies, which we had missed! =) The rest of the weekend was dedicated to getting things in order at the house before school started back. I didn't get anything done the weekend previous to this b/c of my sickness. Jordan and I rearranged our entire house. We sold some furniture (and got a flat screen TV with our money!!!=) and just made more room in our place-its much more 'homey' now and it seems bigger-so feel free to come visit now!!!
Hope everyone else had a safe and fun break, it goes by so quickly. The memories made though are very well cherished in our hearts, and I am SO incredibly thankful I had the time off this year to enjoy it with not only my husband, but my entire family.
Here are a few picks: