Thursdays are Tim’s days off, so we went down to the city to celebrate David’s birthday. We spent the day with David, Adrienne, Maggie, and Ruby in the Mall of America. That was Tim’s first time to go to the Mall of America, and there is a Mac store in there, so going was of interest to him. After the mall, we ate dinner at Olive Garden. I haven’t eaten there in a long time. Their salad and breadsticks are my favorite thing to eat there. So I just got soup with it and enjoyed a nice meal.

I am finding it hard to find places up here with good sweet tea. So when we asked the waitress if they had sweet tea, she was slow to answer, but gave us extra sweet tea that I had to add some water to. Speaking of things hard to find up here….Tim and I went out to eat last week with one of the gift certificates we got from our welcoming party, and decided to try some ribs…it just made me miss bbq even more. I compared them to brisket…but then even took that back. Ribs are my favorite bbq to eat, and I was dissapointed. Oh well. That gives me even more things to look forward to when going home. I have enjoyed my hamburgers up here though. Tim and I cook turkey bugers at home, so when we get a restaurant burger they are good! We went out with a couple on Monday night who took us to a good place for burgers.

Anyways…back to Thursday! After Olive Garden we went back to David and Adrienne’s and ate some wonderful home-made ice cream cake that Adrienne made. It was very very tasty. I’m not sure if that’ll be something I’ll try to do just yet. Tim will probably just get an ice cream cake from DQ.

Last night was fun. Tim and I went to Pastor Rol and Joyces for dinner and games. Dinner and dessert was wonderful. This morning when I woke up I was craving dinner again! And then they introduced us to Mexican Train. I’ve played Chicken Foot before, so I think I caught on pretty quickly. It was a fun game…even though I did stay in last place the whole game. Tim hasn’t ever played any type of domino game and stayed in 1st place! Good job babe! I love it when the 4 of us get together to play games ’cause we’re all pretty competitive which leads to an interesting and funny evening! So thank you Pastor Rol and Joyce for such a fun night!

Another precious baby has been born. My cousin Ben had his first child on Saturday. Which is also my Uncle Denny’s first grand baby! So congratulations to the new parents and grandparents! I am really looking forward to our family reunion this summer. There are so many new people to meet this time around. Babies and in-laws. It will be a great week!

Tonight the youth did a baby shower for Connor and Amanda. Bria is 2 weeks old now. I am loving having all the babies around!

Tomorrow Tim and I have a missionary that we support coming to stay with us. He is coming through in between stops he is making at various churches. So he will go to small groups with us tomorrow and then get on his way Tuesday. So today Tim and I set up our basement. It looks really nice! I need to go buy a couple more items for the bathroom to make it complete. I’ll try to take some pictures tomorrow. I just realized today that we have shown people pics of our house before we moved in, but don’t have any pics with it all decorated. If I have time after cleaning tomorrow and before Jeremy gets here then I’ll snap some photos.

The snow is melting.
This is whats left of our snowman.
Someone has been enjoying his nose!
Could be our little chipmunk friend we’ve seen around the last couple of days.

This is his hiding place when we get a little too close for comfort. We figured this guy has got to be Dale (from Chip and Dale) ’cause he is real spastic in his movements.

It got into the 60s today! We enjoyed a wonderful walk; after…
Our invasion of the bugs. Yup, the bugs are hatching in the warm weather and trying to get in the house! Yuck!
So Tim is hard at work trying to keep them out. Look at them crawling up the wall as he sprays!
This is what those nasty bugs look like. And they fly!
We need bigger spiders than this around to get rid of our bugs.

Today Tim and I went and bought our first vacuum. After going to a couple different stores and doing some research we decided on the Hoover Savvy. So far I really like it. While dinner (which was amazing) was cooking I vacuumed up our living room before we had some visitors. The Savvy has a dirty and clean light to let you know when the floor is clean. I guess there is some type of sensor that lets you know when it’s still picking up dirt. So I stared at the red light and was so happy when it turned green. It took a little while to vacuum our living room, I’m thinking because it hasn’t been vacuumed in over a month. Yikes! And when you look in the canister of how much dust and dirt were picked up, it’s frightening. I’ll probably vacuum the rest of the house tomorrow.

So dinner was great. (Thanks for Betty Crocker.)A few weeks ago before going grocery shopping I picked out a few different recipes that I wanted to try. And tonight was Meat Loaf and Au Gratin Potatoes. I really like the boxed Au Gratin Potatoes, but since they have coloring in it and Tim wont eat that, we don’t buy it. So I was going to try to make mashed potatoes for the first time, but then saw the recipe for these and remembered my longing to eat them. We’ve got quite a bit of left overs with the potatoes ’cause I wanted to use all we had left before they got bad. The Meat Loaf turned out great and so did the potatoes. I was proud of this meal.

Then we had some youth come over to help make posters. Brittany, Brenden and Mitch came over before Tim had to leave to go to a meeting at the church tonight. And then Alison, Megan, Laura and Rachael came over to help also. The youth do an Easter Breakfast each year to help raise money for the mission trip, so they all came over to help make posters to advertise. They’ll be hung up for church on Sunday, so I’m guessing I’ll probably go into work with Tim tomorrow and help with that.

I had a great night. I wasn’t so sure how many youth would be able to come over and help with the posters ’cause it was a last minute thing put together, but I am very pleased with how many came. It was perfect. I really enjoyed having that time to hang out with youth.

Now I am waiting for Tim to come home from his meeting. Trying to decide if I should bake some delicious low-fat brownies or wash up some fresh strawberries. Maybe both?

Sunday night was mine and Tim’s welcome dinner to our church. We were suppose to have it 3 weeks ago, but it got snowed out. I don’t think I have ever had so much fun at a church welcoming. And some of Tim’s family was able to make it too. When we got down stairs for the dinner one asked, “Is this all for you two?” And it was. Our church did an awesome job at making us feel welcomed.

We started off with a potluck dinner, then went upstairs for the entertainment. The youth and children started us off with some praise songs and then the Sr. Pastor re-wrote the words to “Deep in the Heart of Texas” of which Pastor Rol and Joyce lead everyone in singing. I was laughing so hard I had tears in my eyes. Tim was brought up for a cell phone text messaging competition, of which I got to participate in the second part. Turns out, Tim’s better at text messaging than the youth! Then we had a BBQ Sauce taste testing contest. We were sat in front of 4 different bowels of BBQ sauce and had to guess which was which. Only 2 of which I have ever had before. And I am proud to say that I am a true Texas and was able to get 2 of 4 of the sauces correct, of which Tim had none…but he’s not an original Texan. The easiest sauce to guess was KC Masterpiece, and then they had sauces from 3 bbq places up north. I have got to say that the South makes much better sauce.

Then the night ended with gifts from the congregation and the youth leaders praying over Tim and I.

God has really blessed me and Tim with this move up here. Although it’s hard to be so far away from family and friends, I know we are where God wants us, and thats more than I could ask for.

Tim wrote some about the welcome and posted pictures on his blog also.

The internet was down this morning, so that totally threw my day off for me. Instead of getting to sit here on the computer I cleaned! So our kitchen looks nice and our laundry is getting clean. I also made a sign for us to remember to put out our trash tonight. We signed up for trash pick up 3 weeks ago, and have thus far forgotten to put our trash out. So last week and the week before we get a call at 6:30am Thursday morning telling us that we forgot to put it out. So hopefully 3rd times a charm and we’ll get it out there tonight for tomorrow morning. Our garage looks like a dump right now with all of our trash bags lining the walls. I think it will take a couple more weeks before we get all of our trash out of here!

Tim fixed our TV! It still restarts every so often, but I was so proud of it to stay on for the whole 2 hours of American Idol last night. Again, I voted for Melinda Doolittle. I could listen to her sing non-stop. I love her voice. And I was very proud of Haley Scarnato. She really stepped up her game last night and did a good job. Hopefully she’ll continue in that direction ’cause that was the first performance she did that I enjoyed. So good job Haley. I really hope that Sanjaya Malakar goes home tonight. Everyone has blown him out of the water, and I believe he is still on because a group of people who are trying to just keep drama in American Idol by upsetting everyone who knows he doesn’t compare to the other singers. Although, he is getting a lot of publicity with this.

Okay, who else watched American Idol last night? I can not understand the little girl who was just bawling her eyes out during the show! It worked for her though ’cause she got lots of air time and got to meet all of the contestants up on stage in front of everyone at the end of the show. I told Tim after the show, “I bet all the other girls there were thinking, ‘why didn’t I think of that!’.” Lets see tonight if there is someone else bawling to get the attention she got. I just don’t get it.

Well, all the snow has been melting. The sun has been warm and bright and our snow man is just part of one snowball now with sticks next to it on the ground. I’m going to miss the snow, but everyone up here tells us that the summers are gorgeous. I just wanted to share one last snow picture with y’all since it will all be gone soon. I took this picture by our house when we had our week of snow a couple weeks ago. I think these trees are gorgeous, and when they’re snow covered, even more so.

On a side note, I am feeling much better today. I made the mistake of eatin 5 chips with salsa…my stomach didn’t appreciate that, but it only took a little soda to fix. I spent the day finishing the puzzle that Grace got me for Christmas. I started it last night with just getting the border together. I’ll probably take it apart and put it back in the box tomorrow before Ruby gets here. I’ve always had the good intention of making pictures out of puzzles, but never have. So this time I figure it’d just be more fun to put all 1,000 pieces back together another time.

So thank you Grace for entertaining me all day long today! Tim doesn’t grasp the idea of why anyone would ever want to put a puzzle together. Although he did sit for about 15 minutes and help. He tried to tell me that I should have fun cleaning the house ’cause when it’s a mess, putting everything back in it’s place is like a puzzle. I do enjoy puzzles…but our house is totally different!

Sunday was good. Bad timing with the time change though. Tim read during the early service, so I was struggling to stay awake during service and Sunday school. It was nice to take a nap afterwards though. And then I subbed at the high school on Monday and Tuesday. They are looking to hire someone for a position that is open, so I tried it out and turned it down. It wasn’t something I would be passionate about. I was certified in Texas to teach elementary, and I was in the highschool doing special ed. I just don’t think God has geared me for that.

Monday night I stayed home instead of going to c-groups. I was very very homesick the week before until Monday. So I stayed home to spend some alone time with God, and then called Brianne. That helped a lot!

So Tuesday was my last day at the highschool. Then Tim and I gave our testimonies to the membership committee at church, working on getting our membership. Then I spent the rest of the day at Amanda and Connor’s. I got to hold Bria a lot, and stayed for dinner and American Idol.

Wednesday I went to the Jr. High youth group. I really enjoyed it. I learned a lot more kids names on Wednesday. Now I just have to pray that God will help me remember them. We split into small groups for discussion. I really liked me group. Great kids!

And then Wednesday night…or more like Thursday morning at 3:30 I was attacked with some type of stomach bug. Not a good day Thursday. I stayed in bed with our bathroom near by. Today I was feeling much better. But right now it’s late and way past my bed time. I’ll have to sleep in a while to catch up with my rest. Tim has been great all during this time. Anytime I needed anything, he was there. And constantly checking up on me. We had planned to go into the city Thursday, but when I had kept us awake from 3:30-4:30am and still was feeling horrible that morning, Tim backed out of his meeting he had and stayed with me. I was looking forward to getting to hang out with Adrienne, Maggie, and Ruby too. These meetings happen every month, so hopefully next month it’ll happen. I am very proud of Tim for taking care of me so well with me not feeling good. He kept me company when I wanted it, and left me alone with I wanted to be by myself. He brought me what I wanted, and made sure I was comfortable. What a husband! I love him!

So that’s my week.

Dan, Maggie and Ruby came over today. So our house looks really good right now. We cleaned for a while yesterday and this morning before they arrived. And I finally got a haircut! I haven’t had one since before the wedding. My hairdresser is a girl in the church who is my age. Very sweet. It was nice to meet her and talk with her. Turns out she has a sister Katelin’s age, so that was neat to bond over.

Tim cleaned a lot while I was getting my haircut, and we got everything finished just in time for Dan, Maggie and Ruby to show up. Ruby was sleeping when they arrived so we had time to eat lunch before she woke up. Then we gave a tour of our house and went outside to play.
We got to ride around on the snow mobile and sled down our hills. Ruby was so much fun to watch sled…but man it’s a workout carrying her back up!

I’ve been wanting to make a snow man since we got here…and Tim and Dan so kind enough to do it! It was pretty entertaining to watch. Then we used different foods to finish him off and had to take quick pictures before the sun started melting it.

Then we came inside for a snack and played iMAgiNiff. (If you haven’t played that game, I highly recommend it.) After a bit we went to the church to show them around as dinner cooked in the oven, then came back for dinner, hung out a little bit, then it was almost time for Ruby to start passing out. She was getting pretty tired.

I had a really good day. I enjoyed getting to know Dan and Maggie some more, and Ruby was just a joy. I’m looking forward to more opportunities to get to know Tim’s family better.