a new year

well, it's 2010 and the first dilemma...how do you say it? do you say twenty ten or two thousand ten or just ten? Alfred and i have been thinking about how crazy it will be for generations that are born in the 80s (the 2080s that is) (we were born in the 1980s) to think of us as born in the previous century because we do the same thing when we think about those born in the late 1800s early 1900s. Alfred's great grandmother just passed away, she was an incredible woman and showed it to the very end...in her 102nd year of life. SHE was born in the early 1900s. i don't really know why i shared that, other than to say...i hope we can all grasp and appreciate the days we live in. things may seem out of whack with wars and earthquakes, but Grammy...she lived through some crazy stuff too...the Great Depression, both World Wars, Vietnam, the Kennedy era...you name it. living through those things and overcoming them made her the woman she was and we can do the same thing too by letting events and circumstances shape us for the better as God mold us through them.

so our Christ-mas was wonderful. it was the first time i had been away from my family and that was a pretty big deal to me. but being with Alfred was wonderful! we had our own little Christ-mas morning together in our own little house with our own little tree.

of course we had to do some decorations. i think it will be an official tradition to make a wreath and whatever else we can together. we got hollies and winter berries from the farm. it was the first time i got to make Christ-mas decorations with real berries!

(for some reason we don't have a picture of Alfred's wreath, but it was incredible and he's really good at it :)

our first Christ-mas pictures (yes there was actually snow the week before Christ-mas so we still had some on the ground! felt a little bit like home seeing as we had more snow than Jackson)...

and yes...we used Alfred's wool socks for our stockings because even with the best of intentions i didn't have time to make them...

i gave Alfred some camping gear (some of which he plans to return to buy boating/wakeboarding stuff :) and he promised me a bench. yes, a bench. we have one couch in our little house and ZERO storage space for our everyday things so he promised to make me a bench. that promise materialized last weekend into this...

and i am thrilled beyond words! we found one green basket at Target and asked for three more...the guy came back with one green one and two polka dotted ones! so that's what we went home with and now i have a place to put things!!!! isn't it beautiful? Alfred is very talented with building things.

back to Christ-mas, Alfred's parents came over for a few hours that morning. we opened presents and i presented my first Poteca. Poteca is a Slovenian bread that Cathy's mother always made for Christ-mas morning. the tradition has carried on down through to the grandkids and i have known of it through Alfred's cousins, the Forbes girls. so i had a lot to live up to! Alfred, Gerry and Cathy were generous in giving me an A, although i cheated because Alfred did most of the work! we made it Christ-mas eve and then put the icing on in the morning...mmmm....

after our own little Christ-mas and time with Gerry and Cathy we went to our sister-in-laws grandparent's house for a nice dinner and some friendly competition on the wii. i beat everyone in skiing, but they were pretty darn good :)

then there was new year's eve. we spent the evening and stayed the night at our friends' Megh and Ryan with Jess and Benson. that was a blast with good food and games and was not complete without a really awesome nerf gun war. (no pictures of that, sorry)

other exciting things over the holidays included gingerbread house decorating competition (my friend Jenna and spent ALL day making the houses with 5 batches of dough) and we don't have any pictures of any of the other houses, but they were pretty stinkin good!

and the inside...we went all out...

like i mentioned before we had snow before Christ-mas...a lot of snow for out here. 20 inches. so we played...

and some redneck action....

what do you mean by redneck?...

Gerry pulled them behind the tractor too...

the snow made for a beautiful setting. Gerry used some of these pictures to advertise his hollies.

we even went out at 11:00 to get another chance to play in the snow...

we had left for the weekend when we heard the storm was coming because we live way back where the plow wouldn't come for days (these east coasters...they are nuts and cannot handle snow)(in fact we stopped by the grocery store...i had never seen in my life milk sold out like that...they buy milk, bread and toilet paper when storms come through) and because if we lost power we would freeze. the chances of that happening were mighty high seeing as the information we received from our neighbor was that last year they lost power at least once a month. when we got back this is what we saw...

and it made for a very pretty view on the water...

we also went snowboarding...you read it right...snowboarding. a first for me (the mountains aren't so impressive out here...i thought i might not ever get on the snow out here, but i did). Alfred on the other hand is really good even though he has only gone a few times. i was totally impressed. we went with Jess and Benson...who were both quite good too!

and then Alfred took me out...