NUTS

Wow, so this morning, it was 55 degrees when I left for work. By 4:30, when I left work, it was 15 degrees, snowing, with a wind chill of -5. This is what my back porch looks like now...
Isabelle says "PLEASE, Mommy... Let me in!!" She's not even interested in getting off of her rug now.

Driving home actually looked really awesome. It was LITERALLY snowing sideways the wind was blowing so hard. The snow swirled and spun, it looked like waves. It was pretty neat, once I was home and inside my warm house, rather than outside trying to keep my big ol' van from blowing off the road!

It dropped 40 degrees in 12 hours. Have I mentioned how much I LOVE Missouri?! What the heck?

City Museum

Well, it was time for the annual MHBC Youth roadtrip to do something fun and go shopping. This is a fun event that we take every year on the Saturday of MLK, Jr. Day weekend. We try to go to different places each year, but they almost always include a mall, for spending the Christmas gift cards! Last year's trip was less than spectacular, because we went to Crown Center in Kansas City, thinking it was a good mall. But, it's not a great mall for kids to run amuck in, because it just didn't have a lot of chain stores that they would like (i.e. AE, Hollister, etc.). About the only chain was Victoria's Secret (not so appealing for teenagers). So, this year we wanted to make sure that we would have lots for them to do! We headed to the other side of the state this year, to St. Louis for the City Museum and then to the Galleria.

The trip was pretty uneventful, until we got into St. Louis, and then we took several wrong turns because the driver had directions to the art museum, instead of the City Museum! Then the bus lost me (in our van, with Elena, Ruth, and Mom) in the middle of Forest Park due to a yellow light. And when we called Charlie to ask where they had gone, he told us "Go to the end, then turn right on Delmar." Well, if you haven't been through Forest Park, about every 15 feet there is a "Y" in the road... so, which one was the end?! Needless to say, we never found the bus, but everyone did manage to find their way to the City Museum! The City Museum is really like a giant jungle gym... it has all of these cracks and crevices, a fake cave you can crawl/walk/squeeze through, these giant spring things that you climb through to get to other levels, an arcade, an aquarium, just more stuff then you could ever do in one day! Ruth and Elena and I mostly stuck with places that the stroller could go- so no crawling through caves for us! But we did find some fun stuff to do, and had a blast going through the aquarium. We even got to pet sting rays, which were a little weird feeling! Then Elena and I got to slide down a tunnel that went through one of the tanks in the aquarium. Anyway, we had a great time running around, even if we had to stick to areas that were stroller accessible!

After the City Museum, we headed to the Galleria. We spent a couple of hours shopping, which was interesting because of the rules at the Galleria- any kids 16 and under have to be with an adult, and adults have to be 21 or older- so Ruth and James didn't count as adults. But we had a good time anyway, even though everyone had to go to some stores they didn't care about... see Charlie and Scotty at Baby Gap! :)

To finish up the evening, we stopped off at White Castle, where James and Charlie just couldn't resist splitting a case (yes, A CASE) of burgers. The case holds 30 burgers, so they each ate 15!! We discovered afterwards, that 15 burgers and an order of fries is the same as 2900 calories! They were both looking a little sick by the end of the case, but managed to make it home anyway!

All things considered, it was a great youth trip. Only the one snafu with the directions, which mostly just gave Mom, Ruth, and I a chance to do our "I love to be right" dances, and provided the priceless quote now used for all direction-giving- "Just turn left at the end and right on Delmar!" And I can't wait to go back to the City Museum, maybe without Elena, so I can really enjoy it!

Weather

So, seeing as how it is January, these pictures don't looks so unusual, since you would assume that it's snow... but it's not! It's actually hail outside my work. Yesterday there were major storms that moved through MO, and it made for a pretty interesting afternoon. There were tornado warnings everywhere, buses had to be turned back to their schools, and at the daycare the entire infant room spent the afternoon in the teacher's lounge (I bet that was AWESOME). True to form, I spent the majority of the storm standing on the front porch of my office building (yes, outside) watching the storm move in, then watching the hail pummel the parking lot. Thankfully, the hail wasn't big enough to damage the cars, at least not mine. It was pretty cool to watch, though, and the hail was pretty good sized. I picked some up and took a picture with my hand to show the size. It was a very cool storm, but, thankfully, no tornadoes in Columbia! And no hail damage to the new ride!

It's Official...

I'm a minivan mom! So, these are my new wheels. Not sure I really feel old enough to drive a minivan, but I guess I am, since I do. It's a 1999 Plymouth Voyager SE and it only has 64,000 miles on it. It was awesome, such a God thing. We had looked at a few different cars: a Mazda minivan that made a weird noise and had a kinda gross interior, and a Protege5, which is a wagon, but the backseat was too small for Elena's car seat, and the salesman was an idiot. So, as of Wednesday, we were facing turning in the rental car on Friday, with no car possibilities on the horizon. But Josh talked to Dean (who works at Machens Toyota) at church on Wednesday, and on Thursday he called and said that they had this van, which they were selling for $7,000, but they would give to us for $5,000. So we went and drove it, and it's very nice inside and out... so we bought it. We'd been praying that God would just let us know when the car was right, and He did. And now I drive a minivan... :)

Price Christmas

Well, our last big Christmas celebration was bright and early Christmas morning at the Price Ponderosa! We had the traditional Christmas breakfast, which meant EVERYTHING! We had biscuits & gravy, egg casserole, pancakes, bacon, orange danish rolls, and cinnamon twists... it was awesome! Then we passed out presents, and let the ripping and tearing begin! Actually, we all had to watch Mom open her first present, which was from most of the family. They all went in together to get her a laptop of her very own! She's going to hate me for the pictures... but oh well! :)

"You guys are too much!"

And the final product!

In the midst of the wrapping paper mess, Aunt Ruthie read Elena a book, while the dogs begged for treats...

Of course, we had to put another bow on Elena's head!

It wouldn't be Christmas without some good natured... sword fighting?

Mom's favorite job...

There are no words...

The last Christmas we celebrated was in Springfield, and we had a great time visiting with our family down there. It always shocks me to see my cousins, because it seems like they grow up so fast! Morgen is driving now, which just astounds me! They are turning into pretty neat young adults! The best pictures I have from that, I put up on the baby blog...

That's the end of my Christmas posts! I hope everyone had a Christmas as merry as our's! :)

First Christmas

Well, we had our first Christmas as a family of three. It's really my thing, to be in our house with our family on Christmas morning. I don't care if we drive all day after that, or come home late Christmas Eve night. I like to be in our house with our family on Christmas morning, there's just something special about that. This Christmas was certainly no exception, it was extra-special to have this first Christmas with Elena, even if she was too young to really "get" what was happening. We woke up early, traded stockings, and opened gifts. I got Josh a new MP3 player, since his was stolen with the laptop last summer. This one actually has a screen so he can organize his music, and it's much, MUCH bigger- 4 gb, vs the 560 mb one he had, and the 1 gb he had been borrowing from me. He also got two new tie chains, a Garfield calendar, and Big Smith's children's album, From Hay to Zzzz, which is what Elena got him. He got me a digital video camera, which is sweet! It records, and then you just download it straight to the computer. It's very cool. I also got a memory card reader that plugs into a USB port, which will make it much easier to transfer my pictures from the camera to my computer, and a tripod, which I think Josh got me after the Christmas pictures where I had to stack up about 40 books to get the camera at the right height. Elena got me some mommy onesies, Truman got me hair bands (so he could steal them), and Isa got me hot chocolate (to warm up with after playing with her).

Gifts aside, it was a great Christmas to spend as a new family. I can't wait until next year, when Elena will really enjoy the tree, and the presents... even if she is still more interested in the wrapping paper! This year she just tried to eat the tissue paper! :)

But the pictures are priceless... and, of course, there was more bow sticking...

The stuffed stockings... now there are three of them! :)

Someday we'll WISH we have to wake her up to open presents... but this year she was none to happy to be awake!

Though she looked pretty awake later...

The whole happy family... taken with my new tripod, then cropped with my new software that came with my video camera! When did I become such a techie?

Isabelle went to TOWN on her present- a ham bone.
Truman pretended to ignore his new toy... though I heard quite a bit of jingling later!
But nothing beats a good box full of tissue paper for a cat toy!
I hope everyone's Christmas was as merry as our's! Two more Christmas posts to go!

Looten Christmas

So the Christmas posts are long overdue, but with the holiday craziness and the whole car-shopping thing added in, time has not been on my side! But here's the first Christmas update...

We started our Christmas festivities with a long weekend in Springfield with the Looten family. We all got a kick out of thinking about last year's Christmas, and how different the family is this year. Last year it was just the original family, and one "out-law" (that would be me). But in the last year there have been two new family members added; Luke and Elena, and now there's another one on the way. I get the feeling that Looten Christmases will get pretty exciting over the next couple of years!

This year, we mostly just spent time together. We ate lots of good food, and baked lots of good desserts. We went to church on Sunday morning, then Sunday night we went to see a magic show in Branson. Grandma had taken everyone to see the show 11 years ago, so she thought it would be fun to go back again. It started off pretty promising, with lots of fun tricks like shutting the woman in the cage, putting a blanket over it, and having a panther in the cage when the blanket came off. We didn't get to see the white tigers that the show is famous for, but we figured they'd be featured in the second half... wow, were we wrong! At the start of the second half, Elena decided she was done, so Josh and I took her to the cry room, which really didn't keep us from watching the show, because it was a soundproof room with a window and piped in sound, so we could still hear and see everything that was happening. Unfortunately, we kind of wished we couldn't see and hear it all! The second half of the show was his "Christmas Spectacular" but there wasn't anything spectacular about it. First, it started out with a rapping polar bear-BAD SIGN. It was a play/musical about twin elves, a good elf and a bad elf, and the bad elf was trying to destroy the toy shop of the good elf. But the acting was horrible, the jokes were bad, the singing wasn't great, and there were about 2 magic tricks the whole time. And it was loooooong... so by the time it was over, Grandma was ticked, and the rest of us were just ready to GO. By the time we got home, though, we were all laughing about how horrible it was, and debating over the actual worst part (there were too many to choose from). So, despite the show being horrible, it certainly gave us a funny holiday memory to tell stories about! :)

We opened presents on Christmas Eve, and then went to the Candlelight service at First Free. It was a pretty neat service, they gave everyone a little candle, and then started lighting them on the ends of the row. People passed the flame along until everyone's was lit up. It was really pretty to watch the candles light up gradually across the sanctuary. Afterwards, Josh, Elena, and I drove home, and got ready for Christmas morning! :)

Some of my favorite pictures from the weekend....

Not exactly a look of love... :)

Elena clearly got the most presents!

Grandma & Grandpa Looten

We had the most fun sticking bows on Elena's head the whole time... here's the first!

Stay tuned for our Christmas at home, the Price family Christmas, and Christmas in Springfield (again)!