How did this happen??

seriously, how can my daughter be 18? i am getting stinkin old!

i will admit there were days I didn't know if either of us would live to see this day, but she is turning out to be a great young woman.

for her birthday she could hardly wait to go snowboarding on opening day at the "Loup"

she got her wish..she went with a friend (actually her friend's boyfriend - now that is a good friend to let her boyfriend go snowboarding with her)

more pictures to come!
Happy Birthday Katie

It looks so cool!

Last Saturday Bob spent most of the day in the snow building a stable for our nativity set we bought earlier this season.
I just have to say it looks amazing in the bank that slopes in front of our house. We have got a ton of comments from people on how much they like it! Last year we put up this "chubby" Santa we had bought at WalMart. You know the kind, they are full of air and blow around in the breeze. We had it on top of our roof and it looked pretty cool up there but we decided it wouldn't look right up there this year, looking down on the stable! :) So chubby Santa stayed in the box this year.
I like (love) the nativity much better.

snow, snow, and more snow!

It started snowing Saturday morning and didn't stop until, well I don't know when it stopped for sure because when I went to bed it was still snowing!
We got a ton of snow! We were late for church because there was no way I could back out of our drive-way until Bob finished snow-blowing. And it was really wet, heavy snow so it was quite the work-out for him. If we would of had to shovel it ourselves we would of never made it to church (well we could of if we had started at like 6am or something)a view from our driveway looking across the river...


the snow was so heavy on the branches of the trees they were hanging really low.
Today however it warmed up and some of it melted. Not all of it though.

I actually hope there is snow around still on Friday. Katie wants to go sledding after the basketball games for her birthday party. :)

Inspirational Thoughts

If you watch the news at all you probably heard that Elizabeth Edwards passed away on Tuesday at the age of 61. As I was getting ready for work that morning, watching the Today show, they were briefly highlighting her life. She is not my hero or anything but I was touched as I listened to what they had to say about her. She seemed like a good person who cared about important issues, she loved her family, and she had more than her fair share of struggles. (her son was killed in a car accident, she had a husband that totally betrayed her, she was dx with breast cancer approximately 6 years ago while she still had 2 young children).
I wrote down a few of her quotes that I really liked:
In an interview once she was talking about the most important lesson she wanted to leave her kids or grand kids. She said she didn't know what is the most important, but this is what she would hope her grand kids would remember about her:
"She stood in the storm, and when the wind did not blow her way, and surely it has not, she adjusted her sails..."
I love that thought. We all have dreams and a particular way we see our life going. Of course we all know by now that our life never goes the way we envisioned it going, so sometimes we have to adjust our dreams and carry on.

She also said:
"if your going to make tomorrow count, you have to buck up today!"
short and simple and to the point!

and one last thing, she said as she knew the end was close for her, she "did not want people to say she lost her battle with cancer; the battle was about living a good life, and that she won"
love that!