Wonderful Morning

Love to support the local Coffee Shop when we get the chance. I took Natalie out for breakfast this morning of New Year's eve 2009. A great chance for us to sit and relax and read the paper, and chat about life. Yeti's Grind in Eagle, CO is an awesome place! Kind of set after the scene from Friends, the interior is loaded with comfortable couches and chairs and the rich smell of coffee and fresh baked scones and other baked goods. It's located on Broadway in downtown Eagle, and is one of our favorite places to hang out when we get the chance. Just a wonderful atmosphere.

What can I say?

The dogs enjoy the sun and the freedom of not spending their day in the cage....

Oh!, So sorry to disturb you Wrigley.... :)She's always on the lookout, although appears to not be paying attention. Nothing gets by Sophie.

Man Cave ----> Pain Cave

Changing the name of the Man Cave to the Pain Cave... Had my first ride on the trainer tonight. My first training ride in a while... since the middle of October. I had a nice break from the bike, it's good for the mind and the soul. Plus I think Natalie likes it when I am not training all the time :) Not sure what the season has in store for me with the baby coming and all (change of priorities for sure). But I plan on staying in shape, and will post goals for the new season soon. Have been swimming for about a month now, and will add cycling now and running soon to get ready for a triathlon in May.

Today we went down to Denver to use our Gift Cards. The plan was REI, Barnes and Noble, and Woody's Pizza in Golden... (no gift card, just lunch.) At REI I purchased a new Camelbak for longer mountain biking trips....

An REI down jacket w/removable hood in black.....

and a set of Ergon GC-2 mountain bike bar grips with mini bar ends. Hopefully these will help alleviate some of the hand numbness that occurs on longer rides, plus the bar ends will allow me to get more efficient power out of the saddle......
And from Barnes and Noble we purchased a Baby book that will allow us to keep vital information from the first 3 years of baby's life. It is really cute, and should be fun to fill out and add pictures.After all the shopping festivities, we stuffed our faces and tummies at Woody's! Natalie got her Beer Cheese Soup, and we both had plenty of delicious wood fired pizza!

AMAZING!!!

Today Nat and I went snowshoeing for about an hour. Fresh powder, blue skies, and beautiful sunshine! Temp was about 14 degrees, but with the sun, I would have felt comfy in just a long sleeve shirt. It felt pretty warm. On our way back to the car, a huge bird soared overhead. I looked up and saw a bright white head. Bald eagles are very prevalent out here, (eagle county) so not a huge surprise, and this is the 2nd time I have seen one out here, but this eagle soaring through the crystal blue skies was an amazing sight. It's head was so clear and white, making it unmistakeably a bald eagle. After getting back in the car we decided to drive up the road a bit and saw the eagle sitting in the top of the tree. Amazing sight! Beautiful day, beautiful bird, beautiful wife, what more can I ask for? Christmas Break has been wonderful so far!

Scrabble

Ok, so to give Natalie props, I was on a terrible skid before Christmas break. I was like 0-4 or 0-5 or something like that. Natalie got me a new board for my birthday, and since that point (last 5 days) we are 1-1. I blew her out last night, and she beat me pretty bad tonight. She was pretty upset about last night and out to get revenge. Game 3 tomorrow I'm sure...

Catching up...

We've only been on break for a few days, yet it seems like so many things have happened! Gotta' get everyone caught up :-)

A Birthday!
Nick turned 29 on Saturday. We spent the morning making and delivering food baskets for the Salvation Army. After that, we met up with Torrey and Alana for bowling and dinner.


Fun in the Snow
Nick and Torrey got out on the mountain on Sunday. They got there bright and early and had entire runs to themselves. They were two very happy guys!

Family Christmas
We used the online program Skype (it's free, I highly suggest downloading this program if you have people to want to see on web cam and chat with) to watch my family Christmas celebration on Sunday. I knew it would be hard not being home for Christmas, but this helped out a lot. We were able to open gifts for everyone to see, and also watch them open their gifts. The mics worked really well, so we could hear almost every side, snide comment made by all :-)
PS. Thanks to my niece Finley for the awesome earmuffs!

Paint!
We spent the past two days painting the baby's room. Nick and I had checked some books out from the library a few weeks back. We new we wanted something different than your typical nursery, but weren't sure exactly what. We saw one example with some kid art on the wall, and decided to head that direction. From there, we made the rest up on our own. Nick did the solid-colored painting on all of the walls, and I did the lettering and artwork. Here's what we came up with:

Dr. Appointment
We head up-valley today for our 20-week (actually 19-week) ultrasound. Apparently we can find out the baby's sex today. But we don't plan to find out this info until he/she is born. So, we're expecting a surprise!

Update: ultrasound pics :-)

More Snow
Nick is heading up to The Beave today to snowboard before our dr. appointment. According to their website, they have 3 inches of new snow, with more on the way. We are in the middle of a pretty good-sized storm that isn't supposed to stop until tomorrow morning. So, even though our white Christmas was never in question, we'll have an even whiter Christmas with even fresher snow.

Upcoming Break Plans
For Christmas Eve, we are planning on getting dinner out somewhere (we'll wait until the specials are posted until we decide!), go drive around and look at Christmas lights, then attend Midnight Mass (yes, it's at midnight) at the Beaver Creek Chapel. Should be beautiful!

Christmas Day, we're going to open our gifts and once again use Skype to share the experience with family. And probably take a nap at some point :-)

Our next dr. appoint with Dr. Kohn is on the 31st. She's been a good find and we really enjoy her. For once it seems going to the dr. is actually fun!

Book Review

I finished this book last night about 11:45. It was riveting. Throughout the entire book I had a hard time putting it down. I love reading books that are easy to get into, and once you get into them so riveting, that you don't want to put it down. The book starts off with Shaun Ellis telling a little about his background, and his experiences with animals, specifically dogs, growing up. It's a hook that immediately catches almost anyone's attention because almost everyone can relate to having dogs as a child. Throughout the book, he describes his time spent living with wolves. Anyone who grew up with the woods, or in the country would have an easy time relating with this book. Having spend time in the woods at night, you hear sounds that you never hear during the day, and sense that other animals are watching you all the time. However, the woods that I spent all my time in definitely didn't have wolves in them..... I don't know that I would have spent any time in them in the dark if they had! The fact that Shaun Ellis continually puts his life at risk to save these magnificent creatures is just absolutely amazing. Halfway through the book I thought I had already read the most exciting part, but they just keep coming at ya and you continue to wonder what he will do next to learn more about the wolf pack. I highly recommend this book!!! An amazing and decently light read. Will also give you much better insight into dog behavior, and our relationship with them as humans. Two Thumbs Up!

Detention

Man!!!, Natalie and I's parents must have done something right.... I got into trouble a few times in school, but never to the best of my knowledge received detention. Not sure about Nat, but I'm pretty sure she never got it either. This pic kind of demonstrates what I thought detention must be like when I was in middle school, and even in high school. Some form of capital punishment, where the teacher can make you do whatever they wanted, and I was pretty sure I didn't want to be there. No matter how bad detention would have been, life would have been even worse after getting back home......

Sure doesn't seem that way anymore. I have done more detentions as a teacher (paid supervisor!) than I did in school.... It's kinda funny actually. Here at our school the kids have to sit with their hands on their desks, facing the front of the room for a solid 45 minutes. It's actually kinda comical being in my position. It's not really how I envisioned detention in middle school, however, I'm sure I still would not have liked it very much. The funny thing is most of the kids are repeat offenders, and I'm pretty sure detention is the extent of the trouble they get in. (no more punishment after getting home) Cheers to watching 7 middle school students squirm and fidget in absolute silence for 45 very long minutes...... :) One more day of school till break!

Eventful Weekend

What a fun, crazy weekend we had! Here's a recap:
Friday
We hurried home after school to finish preparing the house for the Gypsum Creek Middle School staff party. Wrigley and Rusty spent the party at Torrey and Alana's house (gee, I wonder why). Sophie stayed here and was well-liked by all :-) There were about 40 people here for the party, so the house was filled to the brim! We had a white elephant gift exchange, karaoke in the garage and LOTS of good food. We finally got to bed about 130 Saturday morning.

Saturday
"Slept in" til after 7. It was mailing deadline day, so we had to get all the Christmas gifts boxed up to send back to Illinois. Thanks to FedEx and USPS, it seems everyone will have their gifts on time! Nat worked at The Boot all day while Nick did some laundry, put the snowboard racks on the car and a few other odds and ends. By dark (5 pm or so, seriously!), we were both pooped. So we plopped on the couch in pj's and settled in for some Christmas movies - "Christmas with the Kranks", Burl Ives' "Rudolph" and some new weird Christmas movie. About 545 the doorbell rang - someone was here with her husband for the staff party. See above....ummmm, you're a day late. Prolly a dollar short, too. That was a good laugh.

Sunday
It's easy to get up for church when you've had over 10 hours of sleep! After church, we got some groceries and headed home to go out snowshoeing...until Nick noticed that both the Colts and Illini basketball was on. During the games, we were able to get the Christmas cards all stuffed, letters written and ready to go. Finally, about 345, we headed out for snowshoeing. Things were good until we got about 7 miles up the road and figured out we were driving into whiteout conditions, and it noticed it was getting dark quickly. So we turned around, came back home, and took the dogs for a walk through the neighborhood. We had some awesome homemade potato cheese soup waiting in the crockpot for us when we returned. The night was topped off with Nat winning Scrabble (yet again, it's really getting kind of embarrassing for poor Nick) and more football.

Fantastical weekend...lots accomplished and so much fun. Only one more week of school until we have a nice break. Can't wait!

First Funiture

Baby got it's first piece of furniture yesterday. After looking at changing tables and cribs for a while now we had settled on a crib changing table combo for a decent price that would make the best use of the space in the baby's room. However a week ago a white changing table (which is the color we wanted) came up on the teachers classfieds. It was being sold for 45.00 by another teacher in our building! This was exciting! A super bargain compared to the prices of the changing tables we had been researching! So it turns out we obtained our first piece of
furniture for the baby.