Week 3

Almost finished :)

Denver Adventure

We road tripped it to Denver last weekend. Our goals were to take Boone to a bird dog training class AND to buy a dining room table. Since we needed to accomplish both, we had to take Will's single cab pick-up truck. Yes, all three of us! It was cozy to say the least. We drove down Friday night, stayed in a hotel and headed to Boone's class Saturday morning. Boone learned lots of new things and most importantly, Will and I learned all the things we were doing WRONG...oops. A lot of the puppies had been in the class since they were really young so Boone has a lot to learn but we were really proud.

He was really excited to find out where we were going...

He found a bird! (it was planted for him but still...)

Practicing his "point".

Another bird...if you look really close you can see it on the ground in front of him.

Got it!

Give it back, Will.

One of their German Shorthairs had just had puppies the day before and we got to meet them! They were so tiny and hadn't even opened their eyes yet. The mom, Ivy, wanted all of her puppies on that little carpet mat. If they squirmed off she went after them and rolled them back on...it was funny and only slightly alarming :) I'm sure they will be tough pups.

She was nice enough to let me hold one though!

Boone was worn out to say the least.

He slept the entire way home :) (it was a much nicer ride than on the way down!)

So after goal one was a success...we set off to accomplish goal two...a table. I found one on Craigslist that I liked and made arrangements to go see it in person. Will doubted me but it turned out to be even BETTER than I expected! It seats 6 but comes with a leaf and bench that can seat up to 8. I think we got a great deal and it is something we can have for a long time. I'm definitely proud of our purchase.

Loading it all up...can you say Klampets?

Isn't she a beauty!?! The bench is in the corner with the quilt over it.

Missions Accomplished!

Progress -Week 2

I went to my second crocheting lesson this week. Here's what I have so far...I think I will be finished with the scarf this week YAY! I'm already planning my next project :)

Play Hard, Sleep Hard.

Boone has been so full of energy lately that we have been trying to spend a lot of time outside with him and letting him play as hard and as long as we can stand it. He has been doing pretty good with it but when he crashes he crashes hard....

and Will does too :)

Snowman Cupcakes :)

My friend, Becky, so kindly let me make cupcakes for her 3 year old daughter, Makayla's, Birthday Party. Makayla LOVES snowmen so I felt like I had to try out the snowman cupcakes. I have the cutest cupcake book, "What's New Cupcake" (which I bought while I was with Becky), and decided this was a good excuse to try them out. In the book the snowmen were wearing hats but due to my lack of experience/ignorance, I couldn't figure out how to do them so I modified and went with earmuffs instead. Will helped me with some of the decorating and I think they turned out SO cute! They were chocolate cupcakes with white frosting, rolled in white sugar crystals. They had chocolate chip eyes and mouths, M&M and Twizzler earmuffs, and orange slice noses. But most importantly, Makayla loved them! Now I'm trying to come up with excuses to make MORE cupcakes. Let me know if you have any ideas :)

Boone was seriously "eye-ing" the cupcakes too but we didn't share with him...poor thing!

Partners in the Paper!

Partners, the agency that I work for made it to the front page of the Sunday paper! We are always trying to increase awareness of our program and recruit more volunteers, so needless to say, we were really excited about this article! Check it out...

http://www.steamboattoday.com/news/2011/jan/23/partners-school-based-and-youth-mentors-change-rou/

Granny Square :)

I decided to start taking crocheting classes this winter.

1. to keep me occupied and
2. I love to be crafty :)

I've only had one lesson but I'm making a scarf (hopefully). This is what I have so far...I will keep you posted on my progress! Be expecting gifts in the not so distant future!!

Winter Walk

Last Saturday Will and I decided to get out of the house and get some fresh air. Boone needed to get rid of some energy as well so we loaded up and headed out for a hike. Since, as I'm sure you can imagine, everything is covered in snow I wore my snowshoes and Will wore his skis. Will can put what is called "skins" on the bottom of his skis and it gives him traction to hike up but he can still ski going down. Boone had a great time too! We let him go without his leash and he did such a great job staying right with us. He would chase Will and his skis and even sometime get a little in the way. It was a great way for all of us to get a little exercise and some fresh cold air :)

Dance Fever

I invited my girl friends over from work on Friday night to hang out, eat some treats and DANCE. Will is such a sweet sweet husband that he bought me a video game for the Wii for Christmas, Just Dance 2. You follow along with the person on the screen and get points for matching their dance moves. Since Will doesn't enjoy playing this game with me (although sometimes he still plays...if I beg him enough) I had to invite my friends over to try. I really meant to and wanted to take pictures/videos on Friday night but got too into my dancing.

So...I'm going to go retro and post the "inspiration" videos of when I fell in love and why Will bought the game for me. When we were visiting in VA last month the Meyers introduced us to the game and I was instantly hooked. Will willingly played then(because he couldn't turn down a sweet little girl). Morgan was Will's dance partner and Riley was mine in the videos. Kelly was my dance partner at one point too but in order to save our friendship I am not posting that video (you can thank me later, Kel).

Trust me...these videos were way more entertaining than Friday night anyways :)

ENJOY!!

House Work

Will and I have been working on some little projects around the house. We're trying to slowly mark some things off our list :) Our kitchen cabinets didn't have any knobs on them and after a year of opening the cabinets from the bottom we decided it was time to put some knobs on. Since I started complaining about this a couple of months ago...Mom came to the rescue. Mom was able to get a WHOLE BUNCH of brass knobs for us. Since brass wasn't exactly the look I was going for she so kindly spray painted them for us a really pretty textured dark brown. She painted them, wrapped them, packaged them up and shipped them to us! Thanks Mom! We have finally gotten around to putting them on and they look great!



Before....our Naked cabinets...

Hard at work....

Will's lovely assistant :)

Boone supervising....

After...the finished product!

We also recently decided to convert one of our extra bedrooms into a "home gym"...seriously! We live really far from the gym and since Will already owned so much equipment (which was previously just taking up space in the garage) AND I became the proud owner of a elliptical machine (thank you Black Friday) we decided to put it all to good use! We have been using it for a couple of weeks but this past weekend we made a major improvement....we mounted a TV! This makes it much much more bearable :) Thank you, Will! Skinny here we come :)

Drew and Katie - Part 2

We spent lots of time playing outside. Luckily we have space and "toys" here to play with so we didn't have to go far. Will and Boone showed Drew the ins and outs of the snowmobile and off he went....

Katie joined in too...

We took them to visit Fish Creek Falls which is a short little hike and it opens up to a beautiful big waterfall. Its really something special to see in every season but we were really lucky because the falls weren't completely frozen yet so you could still see the water falling into the snow. It was really beautiful...as usual :).

If you look closely you can see the falls...

On our way back out... :)

On Christmas afternoon we went to visit the Strawberry Park Hot Springs. We drove way way back and way way up a mountain on a snow covered road to get to the hot springs. It's natural hot springs that they have built into separate pools. It's all stone walls and sandy bottoms in each pool. They have to pools designed to where each one is at a different temperature and go from really hot to cooler as you go down. We of course stayed in the pretty hot one. It was so cold outside that some of our wet hair would freeze but we were nice and toasty. We stayed for a couple of hours which was so relaxing...it was great until we had to get out! That is definitely the worst part of the experience but it is well worth it :)

Shortly after we recovered from the freezing exit of the pools and smiling now that we are all bundled up and warm again....

Drew and Katie got to meet and spend some quality time getting to know their nephew dog, Boone. He was a little unsure of them at first but he warmed up really quickly :)

But Boone dog wasn't the ONLY wild animal they saw on their trip....

We spotted this moose as we were driving through one of the nicer neighborhoods in Steamboat. This guy was literally standing in this persons front yard and eating from their trees. We stopped in the road to take pictures. It was crazy how close we were to him and how he just calmly continued to eat.




We had such a great time! It was the perfect time because Will had the time off work too and even I had some days off because of Christmas. Even though we had already celebrated our "Christmas" with our families earlier in the month it was so nice to have a little bit of family here to share the holiday with and get in some rest and quality time. See you guys next time!