Christmas weekend!

Christmas was wonderful! I love it. The only thing I think that could have made it better was being able to spend some time with Tyler. We only were able to talk to each other on the phone on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day. Neither of us thought it felt like Christmas this year. It was kinda strange. Anyway, I think one of the best parts of Christmas this year was watching my nieces and nephews open their presents from Grandma and Grandpa. They got an awesome red wagon and went for a ride in it later since there wasn't any snow (LAME). All of them got books and toys and some clothes. Makayla got the coolest pair of shoes, courtesy of her favorite Aunt Katie (even though Grandma's name was on the tag). Seriously, if they came in my size I would totally wear them! They were gold checkered and they were shiny on some squares and the others were sparkly. Who wouldn't want awesome shoes like that?! I wish I had a picture...a description just doesn't do it justice. Hunter had a Cars Christmas...Cars chair, Cars books, Cars jammies, Cars bean bag, basically just Cars everything.

Dainin got an Aggie T-shirt and we were twins on Christmas. It was precious so we took a picture. He also got a frog Pillo Pet that's way cute and books. Andy and Shaunee got storage shelves. Shaunee's face when they opened that one was so epic! You would think that she had just won the lottery. It was funny.

This is a photo of Christmas Chaos! It was a mess but cleaned up rather quickly. My stash is on the far right on the couch. All the books lined up on the back of the couch. I have a lot of reading to do...it's not going to get done before school starts probably. Darn. At the bottom you can see Dain sitting in his wagon. He didn't want to get out. It was cute. Anyway, over all it was a really good Christmas.

On another topic, Sunday I finally got to see Tyler. His family was doing a progressive Christmas dinner and he thought it would be the perfect opportunity to have meet them. It wasn't just his immediate family either. It was Aunts, Uncles, cousins, everyone. It was fun. They're good people. We each got a lot of questions cuz apparently his family doesn't get together very often, which is weird to me but that's only cuz my family gets together all the time. We live close though so it's easier. Tyler's family doesn't. He's got cousins in St. George, one of his aunts family lives in Singapore, his sister Julia lives in Minnesota, and his oldest sister Charity lives in New York. Those arrangements make it hard to get together a lot. So now I can say I've met the bulk of his family...probably. I don't know how big his family is though. I still have yet to meet his dad, step mom, half brother, and his oldest sister Charity. That's going to be another adventure. It was good to meet them though. They were really nice. I was a little nervous though cuz, ya know, meeting the family for the first time. I hope I didn't disappoint. I look forward to spending more time with his family and getting to know them better. It'll be a good time.

'Tis the Season

I love Christmas, everything about it. It's such a happy time of year. Here are some of my most favorite things about this season:

Christmas Carols
Christmas Trees
Candy making
Giving gifts
Christmas lights
Hot Chocolate
My VHS of old Christmas Specials from the 80's (pretty great, right!)
Memories from past years and making new ones
My crazy family
Aardema Christmas Eve Homemade Chinese Dinner
Christmas parties
Talking walks in the snow
Watching the snow fall from my living room window
My Christmas quilt that I made
Spending time with family
Getting up early on Christmas Day

Just like the song says "It's the most wonderful time of the year!" I look forward to it every year.

It's beginning to look a lot like Christmas!

Take a look at this beauty. This is my Christmas tree this year. I chopped it down and drug it off a mountain in knee deep snow myself. It's pretty great, right. True it's not the perfect pyramid you imagine when you think of the perfect Christmas tree. It's actually rather square...it has character. ;) This year I was quite lucky just to get a tree. Here's the story.

Every year my family and some neighbors go up to Soda Springs, Idaho the day after Thanksgiving to hunt for that perfect tree. It's one the most looked forward to traditions that my family does (at least I think so). We get up at 6 AM and head north and make to the ranger station about 8ish or so, get our permits and embark on our journey through snow covered mountain roads. We'll find a good spot that looks promising, pull of the side of the road, pile on our eskimo gear and trudge through the groves of pine trees searching for the tree to represent the Christmas season for the year. Once we find it, out come the hand saws and tape measures to cut it just the right size. Then once all the trees are cut and accounted for we all gather for lunch and Hot Cocoa and then load back up and head home. We can normally make it home by early evening, enough time to decorate the Christmas tree before it's time for bed.

This is what happens on a normal Christmas Tree Cutting Excursion. This year, however, was not a normal year...

It started out the same. We still got up at 6 AM, we still got to ranger station around 8, we still drove the snow covered mountain roads. It was those very snow covered mountain roads that caused the problem. A few days prior to this little adventure the 2010 Blizzard hit with a vengeance. Idaho, so I hear, got hit harder than Northern Utah did. The group we ventured with consisted of 10 vehicles, all of which were 4WD capable. Half of these vehicles were also pulling trailers, to make it easier to haul the trees home. There was so much snow from the storm that every car in our party got stuck at least once. The car I was riding in with my brother, his wife, and my nephew got stuck three times alone. The snow was knee deep on the roads and it wasn't the good snow that will pack down once driven on it was that soft powdery snow that you sink into really well. Let's just say that on this trip we spent more time digging people out of the snow than we did hunting for trees. Once we decided that it wasn't worth all that digging and that the roads were just to snowy to go further with anything but a snowmobile (which we didn't have) we decided to back track to the only semi decent spot and try our luck at it. It's about 3 in the afternoon by now, which is usually when we finish up and head home in a normal year (I told...not normal this time around). As you know around this time of year it gets dark at like 5. So we park and bundle up and search the woods for a tree as fast as possible. And that is why my tree look sthe way it does this year. It's basically the middle section of a semi decent tree, but with the disastrous events that took place this year I'm lucky to have a fresh tree that's not from a lot. Basically instead of saying that I just have a crappy tree...I say it's the cousin of Charlie Brown's tree. All it needs is a little love.